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Science says your boss should talk less in meetings
Research suggests listening more while talking less. Killing aimless meetings can help, too.
Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.
Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior.
Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.
As a graduate student, Kreamer was interested in studying teamwork, leadership, and work relationships. During her doctorate work with meeting scientist Steven Rogelberg, she realized that meetings would be a fine venue for studying all of that and more. “You can use a meeting as a stage to study anything you want,” she says. After all, at their core “meetings are a fundamental aspect of how we organize and interact as social beings,” Kreamer and coauthors Rogelberg and Jon Gray, both of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, wrote in the 2026 article.
To tap meetings for study, researchers typically use two approaches. The first is a classic survey in which researchers retroactively ask people about their real or simulated meeting experiences and analyze the responses. The second method is to analyze specific behaviors and trends extracted from audio and video recordings of meetings. Such precise content is “where the music is,” says industrial and organizational psychologist Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, director of the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
In one experiment, Lehmann-Willenbrock and colleagues extracted data from video-recorded meetings to study how leader communication affects team interaction during decision-making. The researchers found that respectful, attentive inquiry by meeting leaders enhanced team performance, in contrast to when leaders asked questions but didn’t attentively listen to responses.
As with many meeting science studies, their findings about what improves meetings’ effectiveness often seem obvious, but meeting researchers note that meetings often stray far from these ideals.
Such research also consistently reveals the importance of active listening, says Lehmann-Willenbrock: not just passive acknowledgement by the listener but actively providing thoughtful feedback. In virtual meetings, because “we’ve all learned to mute ourselves if we’re not talking, very often, active listening is killed completely.”
The balance of listening and speaking also can influence how well a meeting goes. Meeting leaders and participants may retain very different views of whether a meeting was successful, notes Lehmann-Willenbrock. “Often, leaders talk the most, which is also why they often think their meetings are pretty good,” she says. Kreamer also emphasizes that it’s important that meeting leaders lead but not dominate the discussion. Leaders should monit