Close to one billion meetings take place around the world every day. Chief executives spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays inside them, and managers burn a large share of their time simply planning and chairing the next one. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and the menaces of working life — the rhythm that paces the day and the thing most workers say is eating it.

For decades, that enormous investment of collective time went largely unexamined. Meetings were considered too mundane, too messy and too hard to observe to be a serious subject of study. That has changed. Once a tiny niche, “meeting science” is now a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists, and it is accelerating rapidly as archived virtual meetings hand researchers vast new swaths of data.

From niche curiosity to a discipline

The clearest marker of the field’s maturation is a sweeping review of more than three decades of meeting research, published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Its coauthor, organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, and her colleagues set out to answer a question that employers have mostly answered by instinct: what do meetings actually accomplish, and how can they be made worth the cost?

Meeting scientists draw their boundaries carefully. Not every conversation counts. The field defines its subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” Kreamer told Ars Technica — a definition broad enough to capture the cave, the field, the market square and the town hall, but narrow enough to exclude the hallway chat that happens to turn into a working session.

“Meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.”

Why we gather at all

Part of the reason meetings have proven so durable and so hard to kill is that they serve functions far beyond decision-making. Gathering to talk fulfills basic human needs to connect, communicate and cooperate. People have long come together to get something done, to share ideas, to get on the same page — or simply to remark on the weather. Strip meetings out of an organization and you do not just remove wasted hours; you remove the ritual glue that holds teams together.

That dual nature helps explain the persistent gap between how workers feel about meetings and how readily they schedule more of them. The same gathering that produces alignment and belonging can also produce frustration, fatigue and the well-documented phenomenon researchers call “meeting recovery” — the mental decompression people need before they can return to focused work.

The boss problem

The most counterintuitive thread running through the research concerns hierarchy. The instinct of many leaders is to open the meeting, frame the discussion and fill the silences. The evidence points the other way. When the most senior person in the room speaks first and speaks most, they anchor the conversation, discourage dissent and crowd out the very perspectives they convened the meeting to hear. The prescription implied by the science is blunt: bosses should talk less.

That finding lands awkwardly in corporate cultures where visibility is often equated with leadership. But meeting researchers argue that a quieter chair is a more effective one — a leader who sets the goal, allocates airtime and then cedes the floor tends to get better information and better decisions in return.

Virtual meetings as a data goldmine

What is truly transforming the field is the technology layer. Video-conference platforms now generate recordings, transcripts and participation logs as a byproduct of ordinary work, giving researchers and companies a previously unimaginable observational record. Where earlier scholars relied on surveys and stopwatches, today’s meeting scientists can analyze who speaks, when, for how long and with what effect across thousands of sessions.

The same data trove is powering a wave of commercial analytics tools that promise to score meeting efficiency, flag monologues and summarize action items — often using AI. That raises familiar questions about surveillance and consent, particularly in workplaces where attendance is mandatory and recording is the default.

• Scale: roughly one billion meetings occur globally each day.
• Seniority cost: CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings.
• Management drag: planning and leading meetings consumes much of a manager’s schedule.
• Research shift: archived virtual meetings are now the field’s fastest-growing data source.

What the science suggests

The practical guidance emerging from the literature is less about eliminating meetings than about disciplining them. Clear goals and agendas, smaller and more deliberate invitation lists, explicit roles for who decides and who contributes, and a chair who resists the urge to dominate all show up repeatedly as markers of meetings that people judge worthwhile.

There is also a growing case for subtraction. If a meeting exists only to transmit information that could be written, or to satisfy a calendar habit inherited from a previous regime, the science suggests it is a cost with no return. The hardest part of meeting reform, researchers concede, is not designing a better agenda — it is mustering the organizational will to cancel the ones that should never have been scheduled.

The bigger picture

The emergence of meeting science mirrors a broader shift in how white-collar work is being studied and instrumented. As collaboration software becomes the substrate of the working day, the mundane rituals of office life are becoming measurable — and therefore contestable. Companies now have the tools to see what meetings do; whether they use that visibility to protect employees’ attention or simply to extract more from it will be one of the defining workplace questions of the coming decade.

For now, the headline finding is elegantly simple: the meeting is not going away, but the person running it probably should say less.