There are many things to like about work -- the collegiality, the productivity, the paycheck -- but few people would include meetings in the list. Monotonous, time-consuming, often pointless, meetings can be to workdays what speed bumps are to main thoroughfares: annoying, well-intentioned impediments to progress.
Now researchers have examined how an endless series of meetings can affect employees' sense of well-being and job satisfaction. In a report published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers found that more people acknowledge meetings as a positive part of their days at work than they would ever publicly admit.
The results were something of a surprise. "If you walk down the halls of any organization and ask about meetings, people invariably express frustration," says Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational and industrial psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who led the research. "They say that they have many other things they could be doing, or that the meeting is taking them away from real work."
So Rogelberg had understandably assumed that the more meetings they attended in a day, the more dissatisfied an employee would be -- especially with business consultants and management experts saying that meetings consume more of the workday than ever before.
According to a 1998 MCI white paper, "Meetings in America," there are approximately 11 million meetings in the United States each day. During those meetings, 91% of the professionals said that they daydreamed and 39% even admitted to sneaking a nap. Most professionals attend about 62 meetings a month, and according to the book, "Better Business Meetings," more than 50% of that meeting time is wasted.
But, Rogelberg says, "The experiences and reactions to meetings are not universal."
In the research, published in January in the Journal of Applied Psychology, two surveys were conducted, the first involving 676 full-time employees from the United States and the United Kingdom, and the second including 304 employees from these countries and also Australia.
The participants were predominantly women who worked in private businesses, nonprofit organizations and government organizations. The researchers found that the employees spent nearly six hours in meetings every week and that involved, on average, four meetings. For some, the meetings were irritating interruptions; others found that the meetings were valuable, even enjoyable.
