Meetings in Organizations:
Do They Contribute to Stakeholder Value
and Personal Meaning?
Presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Philadelphia, Pa., USA, August 3-8, 2007
Do not quote without permission
Ib Ravn
Learning Lab Denmark
The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University
Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark
www.dpu.dk/fv, ravn@dpu.dk, cell: +45 28 95 95 01
Abstract
Meetings in organizations have evolved from the infrequent, slightly
authoritarian meeting of the 1950’s to the ubiquitous and often longwinded
meeting of the 1990’s. Today, two important, recent trends in work and business
pose new challenges: Organizational work is seen as having to serve all
organizational stakeholders, not just owners, and work must be subjectively
meaningful to the modern, demanding and well-educated employee. Do
meetings answer to these challenges? A survey of 300 knowledge workers in five
highly successful companies in Denmark showed that although employees were
satisfied with their managers’ traditional meeting-management skills, the
customer was largely invisible in organizational meetings, and meetings engage
the hearts and minds of the employees only to a moderate degree. It is
concluded that despite massive changes in business and work life, meetings
seem to have changed little. They have been insufficiently integrated into the
organizational value chain and they are experienced as only moderately
important to customers and employees.
Key words: Meeting Management, Meetings, Personal Meaning, Stakeholder
Value.
3
1. Meetings are Everywhere
Meetings are prevalent in modern organizational life. The bureaucratic and
corporate routines of yesteryear have given way to perennial change, and
meetings are a major means to control this. Mergers and acquisitions,
interdisciplinary projects, team-based work and widespread innovation all call for
meetings that coordinate, delegate, share knowledge and ownership and move
projects forward. Various studies find that managers spend 25-80% of their time
in meetings, and managers report that they go to more meetings than previously
(Romano and Nunamaker, 2001, p. 3).
Despite the ubiquity of meetings, they have received relatively little scholarly
attention. There are popular books lambasting meetings (Lencioni, 2004) and
there are scores of how-to books based on the authors’ personal experience
(e.g., Streibel, 2002; Miller and Pincus, 2004). The advent of the computer
prompted a considerable literature on computer-mediated meetings and
conferences (Jessup and Valacich, 1991; Niederman, 1996) which is, however, of
slight relevance to the common face-to-face meeting. There are vast amounts of
research on the performance of teams and small groups (Guzzo and Dickson,
1996; Turner, 1999), some of which, of course, do their business in meetings.
However, as pointed out in one of the few monographs in the non-field of
meeting studies (Schwartzman 1989, p. 10-11), “Meetings have generally been
the background structure for examining and assessing what are assumed to be
the ’really’ important matters of organizational life, for example, power,
decisions, ideology, and conflict”. The meeting per se, as a social institution
worthy of study in its own right, does not appear frequently in the scholarly
literature (some of the odd studies include five pages in Mintzberg, 1973;
Schwartzman, 1986; Panko and Kinney, 1995; Bluedorn, Turban and Love,
1999; Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield, 2006; Rogelberg, in press). These
studies are empirical and experimental; none has any significant theoretical
content.
The present paper grew out of a perceived need to understand meetings and
help clarify their potentials in modern organizational life. It reports
conceptualizations of meetings in organizations and results from a study of
meetings in five knowledge-intensive corporations in Denmark.
2. The Recent History of Meetings in Organizations
We may identify two broad phases in the recent history of meeting behaviour in
the North-western European countries and, possibly, North America.
4
Fifty years ago, work in business and government organizations was more
stable and predictable than today. Meetings in organizations were probably
fewer. The manager chairing a typical meeting would likely open the floor to
comments when he (it was typically a he) needed to hear some, and would close
it when he had heard enough. We may assume that whether the meeting was
productive or not, the authority of the manager to run it his way was rarely in
dispute. His goal was to run a tight ship, such that his company produced
satisfactory levels of output or his public bureaucracy conformed to his superior’s
expectations and to standard operating procedures. Let us call this the
authoritarian meeting. It held sway well into the 1960’s and 1970’s and is still
found in many traditionally managed organizations.
This ready acceptance of authority structures changed in the 1970’s and
1980’s. The youth movement of the 1960’s and its general anti-authoritarian
sentiments diffused slowly into the organizational cultures of government
administration and the business world. Management styles became more
informal, the boss’ big desk got smaller, managers delegated more, selfmanaged work teams appeared, and office workers became more involved at
meetings. Children of the 60’s, especially those exposed to modern educational
principles, as in Scandinavia, came to expect that everyone has a right to speak
and be heard. Sitting in a circle, waiting for your turn to speak, and listening
respectfully to everyone regardless of age, status or experience, were norms
that traveled from the kindergarten to the boardroom over the last decades of
the century.
In the domain of meetings, this democratic-egalitarian relaxation of authority
meant that the floor was thrown wide open. In the interest of delegation and
involvement, managers let more people in the meeting have their say, and
opinions were offered more freely. Office workers became better educated over
the decades and did indeed have more to contribute. As restraints on speaking
at meetings fell away, meetings became more time-consuming, and possibly less
productive—at least, that is a common perception. Meetings may always have
been ineffective, as portrayed by C. Northcote Parkinson (1962), but with
meetings so much more prevalent and organizational response rates in other
domains having generally picked up, the need to address meeting ineffectiveness
has become pressing.
3. Theory: Stakeholder Value and Personal Meaning
How do the intentions or philosophies underlying authoritarian and egalitarian
meeting styles play out today? We no longer have the placid business
environment of the 1950’s in which the authoritarian leader thrived, nor do we
have the lifestyle-experimental 1960’s and 70’s that engendered egalitarian
5
meeting cultures. We may expect the intentions or motivating forces behind
these meeting styles to look different today.
From Authoritarian Control to the Interests of the Customer
First, consider the authoritarian management style with its urge to control a
meeting. In today’s business environment, how may we understand this
essential intention behind this? Well, the original concern was obviously with
making the right decisions and using resources optimally, for the good of the
corporation.
Today, the good of the corporation is being seen in a wider context. In the
social-democratic capitalisms of North-western Europe, there is growing
awareness that a corporation needs to attend not only to its own growth
potentials, but also to societal wealth and well-being.
The post-WW2 emphasis on increasing industrial outputs and raising the
standard of living has given way to concerns with quality: the quality of services
and products, and the quality of life in society. In local and national government,
the self-sufficiency of mid-century bureaucracies yielded to the service
management and the service economy of the 1980’s, where the needs of users
and citizens are in focus, and to New Public Management in the 1990’s with its
emphasis on value for money in the public sector.
To be sure, large corporations, especially in the US, are currently gripped by
the specter of shareholder value and find themselves slaves to the quarterly
earnings report, but the larger societal undercurrent is about stakeholder value
(Freeman, 1984). This is the idea that an organization exists to serve the needs
of all those who hold a stake in it: customers and users, employees,
investors/owners, suppliers, the local community and society at large (Donaldson
and Preston, 1995).
Stakeholder value is about more than securing a proper return for
shareholders on their investment, it is about that which is valuable to an
organization’s many and varied stakeholders: the quality of life of employees,
customers and local citizens, the satisfaction of their real needs, and the
fulfillment of human potentials in society as a whole (Ackoff, 1994; Ackoff and
Rovin, 2003).
That both the private and public sectors be concerned with meeting basic
human needs is a position increasingly taken by international organizations such
as the United Nations Development Programme (2005) the UN Global Business
Compact (www.unglobalcompact.org). Capitalist stalwarts like the World Bank
has recently (Perry, Arias, López, Maloney & Servén, 2006) urged the Latin
American economies to invest in human capital and fight poverty to obtain
economic growth, and the Bank’s annual World Development report summarizes
the evidence: “The main message is that in the long run, the pursuit of equity is
6
complementary, in some fundamental respects, to the pursuit of long-term
prosperity” (World Bank, 2006, p. 2).
The concept of the value chain represents a related concern with
ascertaining that every aspect of a firm’s operations contributes something of
value to the end product or service. Popularized by Porter (1985), this concept is
used mostly to mean monetary value, but applies equally to the more
encompassing concept of stakeholder value. Being concerned about value chains
is making sure that every organizational activity contributes maximally to
stakeholder value. No activity in the organization can be exempt from the value
chain, including meetings.
Applied to meeting management, the concepts of stakeholder value and
value chains imply that ultimately, meetings are held for the sake of all
stakeholder groups. The quality of a meeting may be judged by the value it adds
to the organization’s products or services—this value being gauged by the
product’s contribution to the quality of products and the quality of stakeholders’
lives. If a meeting contributes to the stakeholder value chain, it is a good
meeting; if it does not, it is poor.
To be more specific: The proverbial bad meeting that wastes everybody’s
time with rambling speeches, unfocused discussions, loose ends, etc. is
undesirable because it does not help meeting attendees make the decisions
required for them to deliver the products or services that their customers depend
on. We go to meetings neither to win a debating session nor to enjoy coffee and
donuts with office mates, but to coordinate our activities so that we may serve
our customers in the best way we possibly can.
From Egalitarianism to Personal Meaning
What is the modern-day equivalent to the second phase in meeting styles
identified, the egalitarian meeting that lets everybody have their say?
Presumably, the original motivation was to open up the meeting to other voices
than the manager’s. Democracy writ small, so to speak. Being able to speak
one’s mind and influence decisions in the workplace was a victory that has been
celebrated by the labor union movement and which, of course, revolutionized
meetings as well, over the course of several decades.
Today, however, the right to speak and be heard is taken for granted by
most employees. The openness and pluralism associated with the opportunity to
voice one’s opinions are now endemic in Western society. Firm values have
become unstuck in the maelstrom of post-modern globalization; social meanings
have are subject to constant renegotiation. Today, there is much more of a
burden on 18-year-olds to invent their worlds for themselves from scratch.
For many, work provides a relief from the uncertainties of post-modern
living. Seen in this light, it is clear that young people want more out of work
than just the hard-won openness and participation of the previous generations.
7
Participation in organizational decision-making and in meetings is fine, of course.
It is simply a baseline today, and jobs that do not involve employees at all are
intolerable to many. But when participation results in endless discussions and no
action, it doesn’t provide the focus and closure that people want in their
professional as well personal lives.
Work must help modern employees create major meanings for themselves.
Perhaps not a meaning in life per se; most people still like to see their lives as
larger than their jobs (not least, of course, because employment may be
terminated an any time, and what happens to a life whose meaning was tied too
closely to a particular job?). But today, work must be personally meaningful, to
an extent unheard of thirty years ago, when a steady job with health benefits
and a decent retirement plan were all that mattered to many people.
Today, employees are no longer functionaries performing fixed functions in
the organization. Employers expect employees to help invent their own jobs and
change them as conditions change. There is no pre-set meaning to be found in
the organization, everything has to be constructed. To sustain herself, work
must be meaningful, or else there is nothing.
We may express this shift in terms of the transition from functional work to
knowledge work (Drucker, 1999). In industrial society, functionaries per form
fixed functions in the organization. Today’s knowledge-based organization has
few tasks that are predefined; the only fixity is the organization’s mission that
stakeholders X be served in domain Y and whatever this takes are the tasks that
need to be carried out. In the absence of extensive job descriptions, managers in
today’s knowledge economy expect knowledge workers to help create their jobs
by spotting and seizing the “tasks” that need to get done.
Vice versa, knowledge workers want organizations, managers and job in
which this process of joint definition is possible and generates work that fits the
individual employee’s interests and talents. Such work is experienced as
personally meaningful—when in the turmoil of modern organizational work an
employee and her manager have carved out a niche that lets her unfold her
potentials for a common good that extends beyond the office.
Applied to the meeting, this means that the knowledge worker expects
meetings be subjectively meaningful. Thirty years ago, silent rows of lower-rung
functionaries could be required to go to meetings just to listen and observe.
Knowledge workers are less likely to accept this role. Not only do they want to
air their opinions, they also want the meeting to provide direction to their
personal work. Just as young and well-educated employees will leave a job if “it
doesn’t feel right,” so meetings will be shunned if they are felt to be a “waste of
my time,” regardless of the fact that your manager may want you to be present.
In the optimal case, personal meaningfulness in meetings may go hand in
hand with meeting productivity and efficiency, if the meeting contributes to
stakeholder value, that is, serves the needs of customers and other external
8
stakeholders. The challenge for the modern manager is to run meetings in such
a way that both ends are served, so that employees find meetings personally
meaningful—because they help provide direction and personal fulfillment to each
attendee—and conducive to stakeholder value—because the direction given is
one that leads to maximum stakeholder value.
Research Questions
At this point, we may reasonably ask: If these are indeed emerging trends in
organizational life at the turn of the millennium, how well do modern,
knowledge-based corporations adapt to them? Specifically, do the meetings held
in such organizations reflect the growing concern with generating value for the
stakeholders and personal meaning for the employees?
In addition, as we inquire into the performance of meetings in modern
organizations, we wish to know how they measure up on such basic variables as
the number of meetings and the time spent in meetings, as well as elementary
meeting-management skills such as timekeeping, use of agendas, discussion
moderation and decision making in meetings.
To obtain answers to these questions, we recruited five knowledge-intensive
corporations in Denmark. All are established, highly profitable companies that
are successfully making the transition from industrial society to a knowledgebased economy.
At the outset, and despite the excellent financial standing and fine
reputations of these five companies, we did not expect meeting participants to
be conscious of customers and other stakeholders during the meeting. Keeping
the customer in mind while running or participating in a meeting seemed to
require such a stretch of the imagination—despite its obvious relevance—that we
did not expect to see much evidence of it. Let us phrase this expectation as an
hypothesis:
H1: Meetings will show little evidence of customer orientation or stakeholder
value creation.
Next, although Danish work-life is cushy and well-functioning as compared to
that of many other countries, the demand for personal meaning in the workplace
is so hard to articulate and seems so remote from the routine business of going
to meetings that we also did not expect to find this dimension played out very
well in the five companies:
H2: Meeting participants will not find their needs for personal meaning well
covered.
9
Finally, we doubted that the managers were particularly adept at running
meetings in the traditional sense. Through personal experience and public
anecdote, we had come to know Danish engineers, professionals and knowledge
workers (the white-collar workers of yore) as friendly folks operating in
cooperative work climates that put no premium on them being especially
effective or time-conscious meeting managers.
H3: Meeting managers will score low on traditional meeting-management skills.
Methods: Exploring Meetings in Knowledge-Based
Corporations
To test these null hypotheses, as we may call them informally, we designed a
survey, an interview guide and a guide for observing meetings. Each instrument
contained three groups of variables meant to indicate 1) stakeholder value, 2)
personal meaning, and 3) meeting behavior and meeting management generally.
Stakeholder value and personal meaning are rather elusive concepts,
accessible and meaningful through subjective report only. Since external
stakeholders have little knowledge of an organization’s internal meetings, we
settled for eliciting the judgments of meeting managers and attendees as to the
impact of their meetings on stakeholder value. Of course, if asked directly, “Do
your meetings contribute significantly to stakeholder value?”, respondents are
subject to self-delusion but, as we shall see, a simple device helped us bypass
this problem.
The dimension of personal meaning is also known to be slippery and eludes
direct questioning (Wong, 1998; Debats, 1998), so a couple of indirect indicator
questions were asked instead.
Simplest were the indicators of traditional meeting behavior and meeting
management; most are immediately accessible verbally.
The five companies recruited were knowledge-intensive, private companies
with some 1000-4000 employees each, which is large by Danish standards. They
were one biotechnology company, one producer of mobile phones, one utility
and two financial institutions. In each, ten mid-level managers were identified,
all of whom conduct meetings regularly. The meetings are of a variety of types,
including team and project meetings and regular departmental meetings. They
are probably fairly representative of meetings held at this lowest rung of the
organizational ladder.
The people attending these meetings, who included chemists, Ph.D.’s,
engineers, software specialists, bankers and assorted office personnel, were
asked to complete a thirty-four-item questionnaire (n=306). The questionnaire
10
asked respondents to focus on the meetings held by the selected manager, not
on all the meetings they go to.
To facilitate comparisons with standard employee satisfaction scales, all
items on the questionnaire were Likert-style, either in the pure form with five
categories and a neutral midpoint (scaled as 1: Very poor, 2: Poor, 3: Neither
good nor poor, 4: Good, 5: Very good), or as interval scales with subjective
frequency estimates (1: Always, 2: Often, 3: Now and then, 4: Seldom, 5:
Never) or with subjective degree estimates (1. To a very low extent, 2. To a low
extent, 3. To a medium extent, 4. To a high extent, 5. To a very high extent).
Finally, some were rational scales (number of minutes that meetings start late,
or hours spent in meetings per week).
For purposes of methodological triangulation, we observed ten meetings in
the five companies and conducted individual interviews (30-60 minutes) with the
meeting manager and with a (manager-selected) meeting participant from each
of the meetings observed, for a total of twenty interviews. Each meeting was
scored by the observer on twenty-three items grouped in the three dimensions
of stakeholder value creation, personal meaning and meeting-management
skills. The structured interviews asked eighteen questions about an average
meeting, what makes a good meeting and what makes a poor meeting.
It should be noted that the meetings we observed were hardly the real thing
one could have wished for. Expecting visitors from a research project on the
effectiveness of meetings, meeting managers seemed to have done their best to
prepare and conduct smooth and productive meetings, as was indicated by
attendees’ casual remarks made during the meetings and the subsequent
interviews. After one particularly swift meeting, an attendee surmised that “You
are not a researcher at all, but someone sent out by management to ensure that
meetings finish an hour early.” Thus, the meetings observed may say more
about the meeting managers’ conceptions of what good meetings should be like
than about their typical meetings.
Results and Analysis: Value and Meaning are Bit Players
0. General meeting characteristics
Non-managers
Managers
How many meetings a week do you attend?
4.2
9.5
Hours per week spent in meetings (Danish
workweek is 37½ hours)
5.0
11.8
11
Thus, average time spent in a meeting
How much of the time you spend in meetings
do you consider wasted?
1.2 hours
1.2 hours
21%
22%
Table 1: Meeting characteristics, as reported by the employees (n=306) who
attend the meetings included in the study.
Of the 306 respondents, 59% were men and 41% women. They had a mean age
of 40. Twenty-two percent of them were managers themselves, mostly team
leaders in other teams.
Non-managers spend 5 hours going to a total of 4 meetings a week, while
managers spend 12 hours going to 9.5 meetings. The average length of a
meeting computes at about the same for non-managers and managers, 70-75
minutes.
The proportion of the time spent in meetings that they consider wasted is
about one-fifth.
1. Stakeholder Value
To ascertain whether meeting participants feel that their meetings serve the
needs of the organization’s stakeholders, we eased them into such wider
considerations by first asking them to gauge the relevance of the meeting to
their own work outside the meeting.
a. Relevance of meeting to work outside the meeting (Survey items include: Do
meetings always check up on action points delegated at the previous
meeting? Do meetings revert to topics that ought to have been wrapped up
at a previous meeting? How important are the meetings in helping you do
your work successfully?)
Then followed a couple of items more directly addressing value creation for
customers and society at large:
b. Relevance of meeting to stakeholder satisfaction (Do the meetings
strengthen your resolve to act to reach the goals set for you? Would your
customers feel your meetings were relevant to their needs? Do you feel you
make a positive difference in society through your meetings?)
The mean of these six scores is 3.2 on the Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. By
most standards, such as typical scores on employee satisfaction surveys, a score
of 3.2 would not be considered very good. Our non-controversial question asking
respondent to assess the importance of the meeting to their work receives only a
12
score of 3.3, meaning that respondents only found these meetings to be slightly
more than “moderately important” to their work.
By far the lowest score in the entire survey was the item that asked
attendees if they think that they help make a positive difference in society
through their meetings. This scored 2.6, which is between “to a moderate
degree” and “to a low degree”. This may equally well be a reflection of the
organization’s overall contribution to the social good – which, if slight, of course
cannot be remedied in meetings however productive. Without this score, of 2.6,
the mean for these six questions on the contribution that meetings make to
stakeholder value is, however, still a low 3.3.
Data from our observations of meetings supplied a counterpoint to these
depressing survey results. The meetings seemed fairly productive and appeared
to address issues of relevance to customers. Our estimates of time consumption
in these ten meetings indicated that about half the time was spent on matters of
direct relevance to customers (new products, customer support, problems in
sales), a little less than half the time on matters of indirect relevance (IT
support, infrastructure, office matters, etc.), and only about 6% of the time on
patently irrelevant matters or chit-chat. As noted above, it is quite possible that
this rather effective use of time was an artifact of our presence as observers.
Thus, the results just mentioned should be taken with a grain of salt.
The subsequent interviews with the manager running these meetings and
one participant from each meeting provided an opportunity to check on the role
that the customer and the larger issue of stakeholder value play in the minds of
attendees. In the middle of a series of questions on their typical meetings,
interviewees are asked, “For whose sake are these meetings held?”. Typical
answers include “For our sake, “Team progress and coordination” and “So we all
know what everybody else is doing”. One says “For the company” and one says
“For the users’ sake”.
Asked a slightly different question, “Who reaps the benefits from the
meeting?”, respondents repeat their answers, more or less: “We do”, “Meeting
participants and managers”, etc. In total, the two questions draw forty
responses, and only one contains a passing reference to the interests of the end
user, that is, an external stakeholder.
The third question in this series introduces the customer explicitly: “What do
you think your customers would think about your meetings?” Typical replies are
“They wouldn’t understand what was going on”, “They would be bored”, “No
idea”, “Our customers are internal, so they would understand, or find them
mildly irrelevant”, “They would think they were fine”, “They might want us to
talk about other things” and “They would understand better why our response
times are so long”. In other words, responses vary, with more responses
indicating that stakeholders would be satisfied than not.
13
What stands out, however, is the surprise that the interviewees express at
the very notion that customers should be interested in their meetings. Many
interviewees hesitate and look doubtful or indicate the question has never
occurred to them.
We may conclude from the three data sources that meeting participants do
not fully see meetings as part of the value chain. In the minds of meetings
meeting participants, meetings are not of major relevance to the end user.
Customers may be on these workers’ minds when they help them on the phone,
design new software for them or send men into the field to repair their power
lines, but in meetings, they seem to play no important role.
Meetings are probably as much or as little directed towards the customer as
they were thirty or fifty years ago. In our survey, interviews and observations,
we found little evidence of any impact from trends like service management,
total quality management, customer relationship management, value chain
thinking or the stakeholder value philosophy that have swept the national and
international business scene over the past two or three decades. At most,
meetings were seen to serve the interests of colleagues and decision-makers
elsewhere in the organization.
Of course, when they are successful, and they probably often are, meetings
cannot help but contribute to stakeholder value, for individual efforts do indeed
get coordinated in meetings, and this coordination eventually trickles into the
products and services that customers enjoy. Meetings are not as ineffectual as
the invisibility of the customer in meetings might indicate. Indeed, our
observations of organizational meetings, biased as they may have been, indicate
that meeting managers are certainly capable of running meetings effectively and
productively, at least when under the subtle pressure of an observing
researcher.
But when asked about the interests of customers and users, let alone the
other stakeholder groups, meeting participants curiously seem to think about
them no more than did the self-serving bureaucrats and officials against whom
the service and quality revolutions of the 1980’s and 1990’s were directed.
2. Personal Meaning
Ten questionnaire items were meant to capture the dimension of personal
meaning. Grouped in four categories, they include:
a. Your contributions (Survey items: Do you contribute to meetings? Do you use
your competences? Do you feel your presence is important?)
b. Your development (Do the meetings contribute to your personal or
professional development?)
c. Meeting energy (Are meetings exciting or boring? Do you look forward to
them? Do you leave them with more energy than entering?)
14
d. Shared purpose (Do meetings produce a sense of shared purpose? Are you
doing good for others by going to the meetings?)
One item among these ten was not a Likert-type question. Respondents were
asked what proportion of the time spent in these meetings were boring (mean
response: 20%), exciting (40%) or neither-nor (40%). Judging from popular
complaints about meetings, this seems a fairly high score for exciting meetings:
Four out of ten hours spent in meetings are downright exciting, and only two in
ten hours are experienced as boring (maybe roughly corresponding to the 21%
of the time spent in meetings that was considered a waste of time).
The mean for the remaining nine items is 3.3 in the 1-to-5 scale, which is
closer to “To a medium extent” than to “To a high extent”. Again, if this score
were found in a common employee satisfaction survey, few organizations would
be proud of it.
On the individual questions, we note that these meetings were not the
energy drain that meetings are popularly portrayed to be. On average, people
leave meetings with no more or less personal energy than they went in (exactly
3.0, equivalent to “the same energy coming out as going into the meeting”).
Expressed another way, meetings do nothing for people’s energy. Here we have
the collective gathering of the day or the week, a great chance for the team to
rekindle spirits and coordinate directions and ensure everyone is on the right
track and does his or her best—and the response is middling.
Meeting attendees see a bit of a shared purpose in their meetings (3.6), but
only to a moderate degree do they feel they do any good for others by going to
the meetings (3.2). They don’t feel they get to use their competences to
significant degree in the meetings (3.2), and they don’t feel the meetings
contribute much to their personal development (2.9) or their professional (3.0)
development. To be sure, if you are an engineer or a software programmer,
working the computer is your thing, not sitting in meetings—unless these
meetings were productive venues of learning and knowledge sharing where
everybody felt their personal and professional development was being advanced.
But not so here.
Turning now to the observations of the meetings, we attempted to capture
the personal meaning that people derived from the meetings by three indirect
routes. First, the mood in the room was typically good, although subject to a
little fluctuation. Second, speaking time was distributed such that in 3-4
meetings, the manager spoke by far the most, but in the other meetings the
time was more evenly distributed, with those having agenda points of course
being favored.
Third, on the apparent mental presence of the meeting attendees. If people
do not pay attention, or if the mood is bad, or if people do not get to talk, they
are unlikely to derive great personal meaning from the meeting. At the meetings
15
we observed, people seemed to be mentally present most of the time. But
selectively so, drifting in and out, gazing out of windows now and then, glancing
through notes, ruffling papers, doodling. And these are meetings where a
researcher is present, sitting at the table with the others, looking sharp and
friendly, taking notes. In sum, they seemed to be present professionally, but
personally? Well, yes, a good part of the time, but not all the time.
The interviews asked a couple of indirect questions to get at personal
meaning. “Are the meetings exciting?” Well, yes and no, is a typical answer.
”They are best when my presence is important for the agenda”, and “Yes, when
my concerns are being discussed.” These typical replies indicate that people far
from always find that “their” topics are on the agenda.
Many respondents, including managers, responded by putting some distance
to the term “exciting”: “Depends on what you mean by exciting” and “Are
meetings really supposed to be exciting?”
In sum, things looked pretty average in the personal meaning department,
and certainly not impressive. Meetings were not seen as providers of special
meaning or considerable shared energy; they were acceptable on this count, but
no more. Meetings seemed to engage the attendees sequentially, as if they
would reason: “When I’m not interested or it’s not my agenda points, I just
happen to tune out.”
This is so common an occurrence in meetings that we may not even notice it
and simply take it for granted. For comparison, consider another kind of meeting
that is supposed to produce results and typically generate immense personal
meaning: a sports event. A basketball team is half a dozen employees that go to
a meeting for an hour on court. Do they tune in and out? Do they gaze out the
window for a couple of minutes? No. Their attention is engaged every second,
even when their items are not on the agenda, that is, when they are not passing
the ball. Why should a business meeting be any different? Shots whiz by every
second and you many need to reach out and grasp a potential idea and capitalize
on it, verbally, as much as a basket ball player needs to intercept an opponent’s
imprecise pass and dunk the ball.
Meetings did not fill up our respondents; there was unused attention,
untapped energy. People did not see meetings as all that important to their work
or their lives. Despite the fact that our five corporations are amongst the most
successful and popular places to work in Denmark, our questions about energy,
excitement, and mental presence—all of which would indicate great personal
meaning—achieved only moderate scores.
4. Meeting Management
Now, how did the meetings score when measured along more traditional
parameters, like agenda, time keeping, discussion focus, etc.? The survey had
11 items on this.
16
a. The agenda (Is there one? Is it clear what the purpose of each agenda item
is? How often do you get through the agenda?)
b. Timekeeping (Starting and ending on time)
c. Maintaining a focused, constructive and friendly discussion
d. Concluding a discussion (Summarizing, making a decision, assigning action
responsibilities)
The questions on timekeeping yielded these average results: Meetings were
estimated to start 3½ minutes late and end 2½ minutes late, on average.
Although we have no data to compare with, this seems not bad at all.
The other nine items yield an average score of 3,7, which is closer to “good”
(which is score 4) than to “neither good no bad” (score 3).
Respondents report that meetings very typically have an agenda, and that all
the agenda items tend to be covered during a meeting. While it is typically clear,
almost “to a high degree,” from the start of the meeting what the agenda is
(3.8), it is less clear what the meeting is supposed to achieve (3.3). In other
words, there may be an agenda with items on it, but what needs to be done
about them is not quite as evident to the participants.
The three questions on focusing the discussion receive scores that are high
in this context (3.8, 3.8, and 3.6), while concluding the discussions and
transforming them into decisions and plans for action are not handled quite so
well, in the eyes of the attendees (3.4, 3.6 and 3.7).
Observations from the meetings confirm the impression that traditional
meeting management is something the managers know how to do. All meetings
started promptly and the agenda was introduced by the manager. In nine out of
ten meetings, all the items on the agenda were covered, discussions were
summarized before decision-making in most meetings, decisions were made
properly across the board, action responsibilities were assigned in all meetings,
and about seven out of ten meetings were wrapped up in the classically proper
manner. Whether this is common meeting behaviour or a show for the benefit of
the observing researcher, the meeting managers know what needs to be done.
For example, one daily meeting that was scheduled to last fifteen minutes was
over in six minutes, all items having been dispensed with swiftly, apparently
somewhat to the confusion and ever-so-slight alienation of meeting participants.
However, on matters a little more demanding, the skill level is not quite so
high. Are managers able to pace the proceedings, such that items at the bottom
of the agenda receive as much attention as comparable items at the top? Not
quite; later items were rushed through in several cases, suggesting that
managers lost control and perspective midway during the meeting.
Above, we noted that the mood during meetings was often good, and
attendees found discussions to be suitably focused. Were the friendliness and the
17
focus due to actions taken by a capable meeting manager, or did they just
emerge out of the dispositions of meeting participants? Our observations indicate
very clearly that they were due to attendees’ inclinations and discipline, not to
any particular interventions or remarks made by managers.
Along these lines, we made some observations on the relative prevalence of
discussion, understood as the introduction and defense of contrary positions or
ideas, and construction, understood as the creation of new and more
comprehensive positions that include the best aspects of the original positions or
ideas offered. Only in seven meetings was construction observed at all. In all but
one case did it come about spontaneously, and this was not on the instigation of
the meeting manager. In other words, securing a constructive conversation did
not seem to be a skill mastered by the meeting manager.
Further, in no case had the meeting manager designed a special form for the
discussion that followed the presentation of an agenda point. The form was
invariably: “Okay, the floor is open,” whereupon attendees would launch the
usual barrage of emotional reactions, vaguely relevant experiences, solution
proposals, critiques, amusing anecdotes, alternative ideas, thoughtful objections,
etc., etc. In most cases, discussions were simple and participants managed to
discipline themselves so that the manager could conclude the agenda item in
due course. But managers showed very little evidence of advanced knowledge of
how to structure a discussion and navigate in the melee of contributions made in
a typical discussion.
Conclusions: Meetings Are Not Very Important to Participants
or Customers
We investigated meetings in five largish, knowledge-intensive corporations in
Denmark, looking for indications that they had successfully transformed the
meetings patterns of the past into something more appropriate for the current
knowledge economy. We explored three questions:
1. Had the authoritarian meeting of the 1950’s given way to a meeting style
that addresses the needs of customers and other external stakeholders, the
same way that large bureaucracies and corporations have turned customerand quality-conscious over the past decades?
2. Had the relaxed and “democratic” meeting styles emerging in the 1970’s and
1980’s been transformed into meetings that give post-modern knowledge
workers what they seem to want so badly from work, namely, personal
meaning?
18
3. Did the meeting managers in these corporations know how to conduct
meetings, as measured along more traditional parameters like preparing an
agenda, timekeeping, focusing discussions, making decisions, etc.
Our expectations on all three counts were low. On the first two, stakeholder
value and personal meaning, the survey scores of 3.2 and 3.3, respectively, sum
up the data. To be sure, these scores are above the “moderate” or “neither good
nor bad” score of 3.0, but nothing that anyone would be particularly proud of.
We conclude that these dimensions were not addressed properly or taken very
well care of in meetings.
On the first point, stakeholder value, we observed managers and employees
act pretty conventionally during meetings, many of which seemed reasonably
effective. However, the interests and needs of customers and external
stakeholders did not play any significant role in the meeting universe. A parallel
may be found in the government bureaucracy or the large corporation thirty
years ago, which of course would go through its motions for the supposed
benefit of some end user or customer, but in such an indirect way that there was
ample opportunity for the quality and customer reorientations in the decades
that followed to issue their wake-up call and help focus organizational efforts on
value chains and stakeholder (or, more typically, shareholder) value.
On the second point, personal meaning, there was not much evidence in our
data that the meaningfulness sought by modern employees was served in any
particular way in these meetings. On matters of felt energy, shared purpose,
personal and professional development, making a difference in society etc.,
meetings did not fare well; scores, reports and observations indicated “bland” or
“just satisfactory”. Meetings do not seem to be the forum where employees get
their fill on these matters. Competence development—that staple of HR
departments for the past ten years—received no particular attention in the
meetings. Personal and professional development are consistently mentioned by
modern knowledge workers as their main motivations for changing jobs, but
both of those needs go largely unmet in meetings.
However, our third expectation, that traditional meeting management would
suffer, too, came to naught: The meetings were fairly well managed. They
scored 3.7 in the survey, which is respectable. Our observations and interviews
confirmed that managers knew how to do this, both in practice and conceptually.
They could open, control, speed up and close meetings properly, indicating
either competence gained through previous training or a corporate culture
attuned to the standards of conventional meeting management.
A closer look at this dimension reveals that managers were most competent
in the aspects of the classical or bureaucratic aspects of meeting management,
such as control of the agenda and timekeeping. Managers were less able when it
came to aspects that concern ultimate outcomes and thus point in the direction
19
of stakeholder value (such as ensuring that discussions lead somewhere, instead
of just ensuring that discussions finish on time) or aspects that implicate
personal meaning (such as trying actively to make conversations constructive
and ensuring that everybody in the room feels comfortable, instead of just giving
the floor to the next speaker).
In conclusion, we find that these corporations have translated neither the
tight-lipped, authoritarian meeting style into a meeting culture that addresses
itself explicitly to stakeholder value (quality, service, the customer) nor the
longwinded, egalitarian meeting style into meetings that acknowledge
employees’ concerns about personal and professional development. In short, the
customer is pretty much absent from meetings, and meetings do not engage
employees more than superficially.
Further Questions and Further Work
Our results may not be surprising. This is indeed how we all know meetings. But
in the context of wider trends in work and business life, they should be cause for
concern. These otherwise successful, knowledge-based companies in Denmark—
a country known for its friendly work climate, excellent public service and
smooth societal infrastructure—have not realized the promise of the modern
business organization in their meetings.
Do meetings lag behind? Do meetings go unnoticed by all those concerned
with organizational development? Do meetings live in their own little bubble?
This study indicates that to a certain extent, they do.
What effect does the neglect of stakeholder value in meetings have on the
management and role of meetings in organizations? This is an open question.
One may speculate that this neglect accounts for much of what is bad about
meetings, in whatever proportion it is found: the occasional haven-like
atmosphere of meetings, the frivolousness, the tardiness, the wastefulness, the
well-known lack of conversational focus, the tacit notion that it’s okay that a
manager spends twenty minutes of his ten colleagues’ time arguing a minor
point and riding his hobby horse, because no one is looking, we are a long way
from the value chain and from our customers, we are sequestered around this
table behind a closed door where time constraints and accountability do not
count the way they do when people are “on their own time” back at their desks,
facing their own concrete work tasks and customers that need effective service
here and now.
If conventional meeting management seems unable to address stakeholder
value and personal meaning, would it not be better to look for a way of running
meetings that took care of them head on? As it happens, there are ways of
holding meetings that go beyond traditional meeting management and
20
accomplish more than just beginning and ending on time and sticking to the
agenda in between.
One such approach is called facilitation (Doyle and Straus, 1976; Hogan,
2003a, b; Schwartz, 2002). A facilitator helps a group or a meeting accomplish
what it wants but cannot do without help. He or she does so by tightly
controlling the process and form of the meeting. This contrasts with the
traditional emphasis that meeting managers and participants place on contents,
that is, the items on the agenda and the arguments entered for or against a
particular point under discussion. A facilitator moulds and structures the
discussion by asking particular kinds of question and eliciting particular types of
response, the intention being to help those present offer their best contributions
to an intelligent, constructive and efficient conversation about the issues at
hand. The facilitator is not necessarily the manager of the group assembled: he
or she may well be a seasoned and respected member of the group who has
been asked by the manager to keep a tight rein on the meeting, thus enabling
the manager give more attention to contents, decisions, plans, actions.
Facilitation may also be a means by which to address more directly the twin
concerns of stakeholder value and personal meaning in meetings. Efforts are
currently under way to introduce facilitation in the five companies and results on
its effectiveness will be submitted to publication in due course.
Acknowledgements
Research assistant Joan Rokkjær took part in the conceptual development for
this study and collected most of the data. This paper benefited from valuable
comments made by her and Nicoline Jacoby Petersen. I am grateful to Allan
Vinther Olsen (pers. com.) for calling my attention to the value chain argument
in the context of meetings. Funding for the research was obtained from the five
corporations that took part in the study.
References
Ackoff, R. L. (1994). The democratic corporation. Oxford University Press.
Ackoff, R. L., & Rovin, S. (2003). Redesigning society. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.
Bluedorn, A.C., Turban, D.B., Love, M.S. (1999). ‘The effects of stand-up and sit-down
meeting formats on meeting outcomes’. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 277-285.
Debats, D.L. (1998). ‘Measurement of personal meaning: The psychometric properties of
the life regard index’. In P.T.P. Wong and P.S. Fry (eds.), The Human Quest for
Meaning: A Handbook of Psychological Research and Clinical Applications (pp. 213259). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
21
Donaldson, T. & Preston, L. (1995). ‘The stakeholder theory of the corporation: concepts,
evidence, and implications’. Academy of Management Review, 20, 65-91.
Doyle, M, & Staus, D. (1976). How to make meetings work. New York: Berkley.
Drucker, P. (1999). Management challenges for the 21th century. San Francisco:
HarperBusiness.
Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic management: a stakeholder approach. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Guzzo, R. A., & Dickson, M. W. (1996). ‘Teams in organizations: Recent research on
performance and effectiveness’. Annual Review of Psychology, 47, 307–338.
Hogan, C. (2003a). Practical facilitation: a toolkit of techniques. London: Kogan Page.
Hogan, C. (2003b). Understanding facilitation: theory and principles. London: Kogan
Page.
Jessup, L.M., & Valacich, J.S. (eds.) (1991). Group support systems: new perspectives.
New York: Macmillan.
Lencioni, P. M. (2004). Death by meeting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Miller, R. F., & Pincus, M. (2004). Running a meeting that works. Hauppauge NY: Barron’s
Educational Series.
Niederman, F. (1996). ‘Issues and concerns about computer-supported meetings: the
facilitator’s perspective.’ Management Information Systems Quarterly, 20, 1-22.
Panko, R.R., & Kinney, S.T. (1995). ‘Meeting profiles: size, duration, and location’. 28th
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p. 1002-1011.
Parkinson, C. N. (1962). Parkinson's law, and other studies in administration. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Perry, G. E., Arias, O.S., López, J. H., Maloney, W.F., & Servén, L. (2006). Poverty
Reduction and growth: virtuous and vicious circles. The World Bank, Washington,
D.C.
Porter, M. (1985). Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance.
New York: The Free Press.
Rogelberg, S.G., Leach, D.J., Warr, P.B., & Burnfield, J.L. (2006). ‘’Not another meeting!’
Are meeting time demands related to employee well-being?’ Journal of Applied
Psychology, 91, 86-96.
Rogelberg, S.G. (in press). ‘Meetings at work’. In Rogelberg, S. G. (Ed.), The
Encyclopaedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Newbury Park: Sage.
Romano, N., and Nunamaker, J.F. (2001). ‘Meeting analysis: findings from research and
practice’. Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on Systems
Sciences, Hawaii, USA.
Schwartz, R. (2002). The skilled acilitator: practical wisdom for developing effective
groups. Jossey-Bass.
Schwartzman, H. B. (1986). The meeting as a neglected social form in organizational
studies. Research in Organizational Behavior, 8, 233–258.
Schwartzman, H. B. (1989). The meeting: gatherings in organizations and communities.
New York: Plenum.
Streibel, Barbara (2002). The manager’s guide to effective meetings. New York: McGrawHill.
22
Turner, M.E. (1999). Groups at work: advances in theory and research. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
United Nations Development Programme (2005). Human development report 2005:
international cooperation at a crossroads. Aid, trade and security in an unequal world.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wong, P.T.P. (1998). ‘Implicit theories of meaningful life and the development of the
personal meaning profile’. In P.T.P. Wong and P.S. Fry (eds.), The human quest for
meaning: a handbook of psychological research and clinical applications (pp. 111140). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
World Bank (2006). World development report 2006: equity and development. World
Bank Publications, Washington, D.C.