Across the global economy, close to one billion workplace meetings take place every day. For senior executives, these gatherings consume the vast majority of the working day, with chief executive officers spending nearly three-quarters of their working hours in meetings. Planning, preparing for, and leading these sessions similarly absorbs the lion’s share of time for mid-level managers. Throughout the industrialized world, meetings function as both the metronomes that pace professional life and the persistent menaces that strain employee productivity.
Despite the vast amount of time consumed by workplace gatherings, organizational leaders long lacked a clear, evidence-based understanding of what these sessions truly accomplish or how to maximize their utility. For decades, meetings were notoriously difficult to study in a systematic manner. That dynamic has changed dramatically in recent years. Once a narrow research niche, "meeting science" has emerged as a rapidly growing subfield among organizational and social psychologists. The discipline has accelerated significantly as archived virtual meetings provide researchers with vast volumes of observable interaction data, offering an unprecedented window into fundamental human workplace behaviors.
At their core, workplace gatherings address deep-seated human needs to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Throughout history, people have assembled in caves, open fields, market squares, and town halls to coordinate labor, exchange ideas, establish consensus, or simply converse. However, meeting scientists define their subject of study specifically as gatherings of people structured around a deliberate goal or formal format, according to Liana Kreamer, an organizational psychologist at the Florida Institute of Technology. Kreamer coauthored a comprehensive review spanning more than three decades of meeting science published in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.
Kreamer’s initial academic focus as a graduate student centered on teamwork, leadership dynamics, and professional relationships. While completing her doctorate under meeting scientist Steven Rogelberg, she recognized that workplace meetings provided an ideal environment to observe all of these phenomena simultaneously. Meetings function as a natural stage to investigate virtually any aspect of workplace interaction because they represent a fundamental mechanism through which human beings organize and socialize, as Kreamer, Rogelberg, and coauthor Jon Gray of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte noted in their review.
To evaluate what makes meetings succeed or fail, behavioral scientists rely primarily on two empirical methodologies. The first involves traditional retrospective surveys, where employees report on their experiences in real or simulated meetings. The second, increasingly popular method relies on direct observational analysis, where researchers code specific verbal and nonverbal behaviors from audio and video recordings. Analyzing these detailed behavioral interactions provides the most direct insight into group dynamics, according to Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, an industrial and organizational psychologist who directs the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
Leading with Listening
In one observational study led by Lehmann-Willenbrock, researchers analyzed video footage of workplace meetings to examine how managerial communication styles influence team decision-making. The investigation revealed that when leaders engaged in respectful, attentive inquiry—asking questions and genuinely listening to the answers—team performance improved markedly. Conversely, performance suffered when leaders went through the motions of asking questions without paying meaningful attention to the responses.
While many empirical findings in meeting science align with common sense, researchers emphasize that daily workplace practices routinely diverge from these theoretical ideals. Studies consistently highlight active listening as a primary determinant of meeting effectiveness. Active listening requires more than passive nod-and-smile agreement; it demands that listeners provide thoughtful, constructive feedback. The shift toward virtual meetings has compromised this dynamic, as widespread muting norms often stifle the spontaneous verbal and nonverbal cues that signal active engagement.
The balance of talking time between leaders and subordinates also exerts a profound influence on meeting quality. Meeting managers and participants frequently leave the same room with starkly opposing assessments of whether a session was successful. Leaders typically speak more than anyone else in the room, which often leads them to overestimate the value and quality of the gathering. To counteract this bias, organizational experts advise leaders to actively monitor their total speaking time to ensure a wider range of voices can contribute.
A robust body of research supports a practical checklist of operational steps leaders can execute before, during, and after a meeting to ensure success. Before a session begins, organizers should carefully select appropriate physical settings, ensuring proper lighting and seating, invite only essential personnel, establish clear start and stop times, circulate an agenda in advance, define concrete goals, and preserve time for informal conversation before diving into formal topics.
Engaging Attendees
Incorporating brief periods of informal social interaction at the start of a meeting, particularly in remote settings, yields measurable performance benefits. Research conducted by Lehmann-Willenbrock demonstrates that a warm-up phase lowers social barriers for quieter and more introverted participants, enabling them to speak up and contribute more effectively once formal discussions begin.
