Eight people attend a one-hour meeting.
The meeting could have been an email.
Everyone privately agrees it could have been an email.
Before leaving, they schedule the next meeting.
This is an impressive survival record.
An institution that reliably wastes time should eventually disappear. Yet the meeting has endured open offices, remote work, instant messaging, collaborative documents and several software products whose main feature is adding small coloured circles beside sentences.
Perhaps the meeting is not failing.
Perhaps it is doing a job nobody put on the agenda.
Information is often the cover story
The invitation says:
Project update.
That may be one purpose.
The meeting may also reassure leadership that the project is controlled, give worried people a place to display worry, establish the official interpretation of bad news and create evidence that everyone was informed.
An email can transfer facts.
It is less reliable at transferring:
- confidence;
- urgency;
- hesitation;
- permission;
- status;
- and the precise facial expression that means, “We agree, but I would like the record to show that this was your idea.”
Calling a meeting “inefficient communication” may be like criticizing a restaurant because cooking at home would transfer calories faster.
The visible function is not the only function.
Meetings distribute responsibility
Consider a risky decision.
One person can make it.
Or twelve people can discuss it for forty-five minutes, reach roughly the same conclusion and leave with responsibility spread into a fine organizational mist.
Collective input can genuinely improve a decision. People hold different information and detect different risks.
It can also make uncertainty safer for the individuals involved.
If everyone was present, nobody can later say they were not consulted.
If leadership heard the concern, the manager has “escalated.”
If the decision fails, the minutes will reveal that the failure enjoyed broad stakeholder engagement.
A meeting may be expensive for the organization and rational for every attendee.
That combination is powerful.
Meetings synchronize meaning
Written updates are dangerously interpretable.
One reader sees a delay.
Another sees a crisis.
A third sees an opportunity to reply-all with a process suggestion.
In a meeting, influential people can establish what the information means:
This is disappointing, but manageable.
This is the priority.
We are not reopening that decision.
The meeting does not only move information between minds.
It reduces the number of officially acceptable interpretations.
That can be controlling.
It can also be essential. Teams sometimes need a shared model before they can coordinate action.
Attendance is visible
Useful work often happens privately.
Attendance happens in front of witnesses.
Being invited can signal importance. Speaking can signal involvement. Asking a detailed question can signal diligence. Remaining silent while appearing concerned can signal seniority.
Declining the meeting is also a signal, which is why people attend meetings they believe should not exist.
The organization receives a collective result nobody individually preferred:
- The organizer schedules because not consulting people is risky.
- Invitees accept because absence is visible.
- Everyone attends because everyone else accepted.
- The full room proves the meeting was important.
The calendar has created its own evidence.
Some meetings genuinely help
Meeting research does not support the idea that every meeting is a little office-borne illness.
Employees’ satisfaction with meetings appears to be a distinct part of job satisfaction. Other studies find that satisfying meetings can predict feelings of empowerment, partly through better information availability. These findings are mostly observational or time-lagged rather than proof that one more meeting will liberate the workforce. They do show that meeting quality matters beyond the minutes consumed. (Rogelberg et al., 2010; Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock & Sands, 2016)
A good meeting can:
- resolve genuine disagreement;
- make a decision with the right people present;
- surface information that nobody knew to request;
- build trust;
- create commitment;
- and let emotion be handled instead of smuggled into twelve increasingly formal emails.
The problem is not synchronous conversation.
It is using one format for six different jobs.
“Could this be an email?” is the wrong question
Almost anything could be an email.
Marriage proposals.
Performance reviews.
Declaring war, although formatting varies by organization.
The better question is:
What job must happen here?
If the job is transferring information, send the shortest durable record that works.
If it is collecting independent judgments, gather them before people hear the most senior opinion.
If it is deciding, state the decision owner and the choice required.
If it is building trust or resolving conflict, admit that people—not bullet points—are the material.
If it is distributing accountability, name that too. Perhaps what the organization needs is not a meeting but a clear record of who was consulted and who decides.
Then choose the smallest format that performs the real job.
The smallest format may still be a meeting.
It might simply contain four people for twenty minutes instead of twelve people watching one person share a screen they all received yesterday.
A test for suspicious meetings
Before accepting the recurrence, complete this sentence:
If we cancel this meeting, we are afraid that…
The answer is often more revealing than the agenda.
…people will interpret the update differently.
…leadership will think we are not in control.
…someone will later claim they were not consulted.
…the team will drift apart.
…we will have to let one person own the decision.
Now the hidden function is visible.
The organization can decide whether that function is worth the cost—or whether there is a smaller way to provide it.
What I still cannot figure out
The most persistent meetings may survive precisely because their stated purpose is false.
We keep trying to improve the agenda for an event whose actual job is anxiety, legitimacy, status or shared liability.
If a useless meeting keeps surviving, what useful social function are we failing to admit it performs?
Until the next strange question,
Osagie
My current hunch: Many “useless” meetings persist because they are inefficient at information transfer but effective at managing social and career risk.
Most likely reason I am wrong: Habit, poor facilitation and weak management may explain more bad meetings than any hidden function does.