Improbable research
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bored meetings
First on the agenda: are meetings too long?
Marc Abrahams Tuesday January 17, 2006 The Guardian
Do you believe, as someone somewhere perhaps does, that meetings, meetings, meetings, followed by more meetings are altogether a good thing? If so, Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg think you should think again. In a newly published study, they say: "We propose that despite the fact that meetings may help to achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings per day may have negative effects on the individual." Luong is an assistant professor of industrial and organisational psychology at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Rogelberg is an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Their report appears in the journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice.
It begins with a somewhat brief recitation of the history of important research discoveries about meetings. Here is a capsule version of their tale.
Discovery: The majority of a manager's typical workday is spent in meetings. This was reported by an investigator named Mintzberg in 1973.
Discovery: The frequency and length of meetings have grown considerably in the last few decades. So declared the team of Mosvick and Nelson in 1987.
Discovery: A scientist named Zohar, in a series of reports published during the 1990s, found evidence that "annoying episodes" - which are sometimes also known as "hassles" - contribute to burnout, anxiety, depression and other negative emotions. Zohar advanced a theoretical framework that may one day help to explain why this is so.
Discovery: In 1999, a scientist named Zijlstra "had a sample of office workers work in a simulated office for a period of two days in order to examine the psychological effects of interruptions. [They] were periodically interrupted by telephone calls from the researcher." This had what Zijlstra calls "negative effects" on their mood.
Luong and Rogelberg used those and other discoveries as a basis for their own innovatively broad theory.
They devised a pair of hypotheses, educatedly guessing that:
1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects; and
2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.
Then they performed an experiment to test these two hypotheses. Thirty-seven volunteers each kept a diary for five working days, answering survey questions after every meeting they attended and also at the end of each day. That was the experiment.
The results speak volumes. "It is impressive," Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, "that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found". Their central insight, they say, is the concept of "the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals".
Rogelberg has delivered this insight in a talk called "Meetings and More Meetings," which he presented to a meeting at the University of Sheffield. He also does a talk called "Not Another Meeting!", which has been well received at two meetings in North Carolina.
· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com) and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize