We spend more time in meetings – and it's probably a waste of time

Laura has been on sick leave due to overload and is now slowly readjusting to her work.

She is in good spirits, but there is one thing that can make her pulse race just at the thought of it: the mandatory staff meetings that she has to attend again.

‘It's an hour and a half without an agenda, where my two bosses just sit and talk about whatever is on their minds, and it's often things that are irrelevant to us and our work. I don't see that it adds any value,’ she says.

‘I can't stand wasting my time like this when there are so many tasks we need to complete, and we can't get them done. I can feel myself collapsing internally during meetings as the energy slowly drains from me.’ 

Laura's account comes from the book Confessions of an Employee, written by Louise Dinesen, Stephen Holst and Katrine Asp-Poulsen and based on over 2,000 employee interviews conducted over 10 years. 

And according to Louise Dinesen, an occupational psychologist, meetings always come up when she talks to frustrated employees.

‘They attend too many meetings where they talk about the wrong things or sit and listen passively to management,’ she explains and elaborates.

‘Many people therefore give up and do not participate with their energy, interest or perseverance.’

Meetings have become an empty ritual

No one know for sure how many hours office workers in Denmark spend in meetings, says Peter Holdt Christensen, an associate professor at CBS and researcher in organisational theory. 

‘That's the most paradoxical thing about meetings; that we don't record how many hours or man-years we spend on them, and that they therefore appear to be cost-neutral in many workplaces.’

‘It is actually only if you invoice meetings externally that you register the time spent,’ he says.

Yet it is his assessment, based on interviews and conversations with employees, that the number of meetings is steadily increasing for knowledge workers.

‘It has particularly accelerated after the corona lockdowns, because we have now switched to also having digital meetings. The unfortunate thing about them is that there are never any bottlenecks, because you can always find a free digital space,’ says Peter Holdt Christensen.

He explains that there are basically three purposes for holding a meeting: The first is if you want to coordinate a task. The second is to use the meeting to create enthusiasm and motivation for a task or effort. The third is to meet to brainstorm and come up with new ideas. At a minimum, Peter Holdt Christensen believes, you should always know which of these purposes you have for the meeting, but as few people are, they therefore hold meetings out of pure routine.

‘It has developed into an extreme meeting culture, where it is as if work has become associated with sitting in meetings when you are a knowledge worker. It is almost a ritual. I have not gotten to the bottom of it, but it seems as if an entire meeting layer has emerged in organisations. People who are hired to organise and go to meetings without contributing anything else.’

The clearest example of this, according to Peter Holdt Christensen, is that countless status meetings are held at all levels in most organisations, 

‘There is a group of people around who are really good at calling these meetings, where most others think; Well, we just talked about that,’ says Peter Holdt Christensen, and continues:

‘You think it's about knowledge sharing, but we rarely manage to do that in formal meetings. It happens in informal meetings, and the surest way to kill knowledge sharing is by having too many formal meetings.’

Bad meetings breed more meetings

Kenneth Agerholm is a partner in the consultancy FLOK and has more than 15 years of experience in training meeting facilitators and teaching companies how to hold better meetings. 

He finds that meetings in many workplaces have become a kind of necessary evil that employees put up with, even though they experience it as a partial waste of time.

‘I spoke to a manager from a large company who thought they had solved their meeting problems by introducing a rule that meetings could last no more than 30 minutes. The result was that the meetings went from being long and pointless to being short and even more pointless.’

‘You don't solve the problems with bad meetings by reducing the time, you only do that by increasing the quality, because then they will become shorter, more productive and more motivating all by themselves,’ says Kenneth Agerholm.

The fundamental problem, according to Kenneth Agerholm, is that few companies prioritise improving their meetings in the same way that they work critically to measure and improve other efforts. 

‘It’s like the only meeting method we know is to sit around a table, drink coffee, and go through a generic agenda, whether we’re making strategic decisions, being innovative, or just informing each other. That’s not very advanced.’

Paradoxically, it also does not lead to fewer meetings when the quality is low – in fact, quite the opposite.

‘If a meeting is well-facilitated, has structure and direction, then everyone leaves after 45 minutes happy and motivated. They feel heard and know what to do next. But when meetings are bad, all sorts of bickering and disagreement arise, and that's why you have to hold more meetings. Bad meetings simply breed more bad meetings,’ says Kenneth Agerholm.  

A few good tips can't save your meetings

It's easy to find good advice for holding better meetings – the internet is flooded with them. 

It usually involves having an agenda, inviting only the relevant participants, appointing a facilitator and ensuring that everyone has a say. According to Kenneth Agerholm, this is excellent advice; the problem is that lack of knowledge is rarely the cause of problematic meeting culture.

‘The advice or those who produced it assume that when we tell people to stay focused or remember to give each other space, they will do it. But the advice is not action indicating, and it doesn't tell people how to actually give space in practice.’

Kenneth Agerholm also points out that there is an important element in holding good meetings that cannot be covered by a few good tips: The social dynamics. ‘Meetings tend to be dominated by the same people who are quick on the trigger and are not afraid to speak up, while employees with a more introverted profile or new hires do not get to speak up. A facilitator must take care of that.’ 

Associate professor at CBS Peter Holdt Christensen also does not believe that good advice or small adjustments are enough to create a better meeting culture. 

‘Of course, it is important to be aware of how you hold the meetings, but if you have so many meetings that people are already going crazy, you can jump and dance and burn as many torches as you want during the meeting without it creating a better atmosphere.’

Instead, he believes that a radical change is needed with the meeting culture, and that the only thing that can truly motivate employers is the economy.  

‘Sometimes I have the feeling that these meetings are held without realising what it does to the employees' motivation. So the only way to get it under control is to register the costs of meetings so that it is clear what they cost in kroner and øre, because as it is today, we seem to have lost control over our meetings.