Freakonomics Radio

How to Make Meetings Less Terrible

In the U.S. alone, we hold 55 million meetings a day. Most of them are woefully unproductive and tyrannize our offices. The revolution begins now — with better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict.

Does anyone love office meetings? Their reputation is so poor that many people simply avoid them — Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, for instance. Some companies have instituted “no meeting” days to give employees a chance to do their work without being dragged off to the conference room.

There are, of course, many kinds of meetings, with different rules, customs, and outcomes depending on where they’re held and with whom: community board meetings, family meetings, the weekly floor meeting in a college dorm. Knitting clubs meet, as do rugby teams and religious groups. But for our purposes, let’s stick to the standardized office meeting. Researchers estimate there are roughly 55 million such meetings every day in the United States alone.

This raises an obvious question: If so many people say they hate meetings, why do we have so many of them? What do we expect to happen in our meetings? And how can they be made less terrible?

Steven Rogelberg is an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the author of The Surprising Science of Meetings. He studies meetings, he says, because he personally dislikes them as much as many other people profess they do.

Rogelberg has found that most working professionals attend about 15 meetings a week, a number that increases as you go up the corporate hierarchy; executives spend between 50% and 90% of their time in meetings. Workers consistently report “too many meetings” as their number one source of frustration at work and the number one time waster. About 70% of senior managers — the very people who call most meetings — say meetings are unproductive. Yet companies aren’t doing much about this problem. Rogelberg says that only about 2% of the companies he works with even bother to survey their employees about meetings.