If you want to know how to conduct effective meetings in the workplace, you’ll love this article.
You know the scene. Eight people on a call, one person talking, two quietly answering email, and nobody quite sure why the meeting exists. Forty minutes later it ends with “let’s circle back.” Nobody does.
That kind of meeting is everywhere. Microsoft’s June 2025 Work Trend Index special report, built on Microsoft 365 usage signals and a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets, found that the average employee is interrupted roughly every two minutes, about 275 times a day, by meetings, email or chat. It also found that 57% of meetings happen as ad hoc calls with no calendar invite at all.
Still, I’d argue meetings themselves aren’t the villain. Researchers have now studied them for three decades. A January 2026 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior by Steven Rogelberg, Liana Kreamer and Jon Gray sorts that work into five themes, from meetings as a source of stress to meetings as the place where a team’s culture shows up. The short version is that how you run a meeting matters a great deal.
So here’s what the evidence says about running them well, from the moment you think about sending an invite to the week after.
1. Ask whether it needs to be a meeting at all
The best meeting is sometimes the one you never schedule.
That isn’t a call to cancel everything. In a 2025 Business Horizons paper, Alexander Romney, Joseph Allen and Zahra Heydarifard surveyed 199 full-time employees and found an inverted-U pattern. Up to a point, more meetings went with more participation and more creative performance. Past that point, both dropped off, and the curve was steeper when meetings were virtual. The study is correlational and fairly small, but the authors’ advice is practical: before you schedule, check that the topic has a clear purpose and actually needs people to work together live. If it doesn’t, an email or a short memo will do the job.
If your team already feels stretched thin, a full calendar may be part of the reason. Our piece on quiet cracking covers what that slow burnout looks like.
Your move: before your next invite, write one sentence that starts with “We need to meet because…” If you can’t finish it, send a message instead.
2. Purge your recurring meetings
Recurring meetings are the ones nobody questions. They sit on the calendar for months after their purpose has expired.
In January 2023, Shopify tried a blunt fix. According to NPR’s February 2023 reporting, a bot wiped every recurring meeting with three or more people from employees’ calendars. Staff were asked to wait two weeks before adding anything back and to be very critical about what returned. The company also asked people to keep Wednesdays meeting-free. Chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian said about 322,000 hours of meetings were deleted at a company of roughly 10,000 people, which he compared to hiring around 150 new employees. Those results come from Shopify itself, not from an independent study, and organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg of UNC Charlotte told NPR he wasn’t a fan of the approach. His view: bad meetings are the problem, not meetings as such.
You probably don’t need a bot. You can do a smaller version yourself.
Start small: pick one recurring meeting you own, cancel the next two sessions, and see what (if anything) breaks.
3. Keep the invite list short
Every extra person costs something, and it isn’t only their time. Bigger groups make it harder for anyone to speak.
A 2024 study from Microsoft researchers Yasaman Hosseinkashi, Lev Tankelevitch and colleagues, published in the ACM CSCW proceedings, analyzed about 7,330 post-meeting ratings from five organizations collected between March and June 2022. Meetings of eight people or fewer had about seven times higher odds that a given person spoke up, and about 50% and 30% higher odds of being rated inclusive and effective. In short recurring meetings, every two extra participants nudged those ratings down. The data is correlational, so small meetings may differ in other ways too, but the direction is hard to ignore.
People who only need the outcome can get the notes. Tell them so in the invite and they’ll usually thank you for it.
4. Write your agenda as questions
A topic list tells people what you’ll talk about. A question tells them what you need to decide.
Deborah DiazGranados of Virginia Commonwealth University, Joseph Allen of University of Utah Health and Anita Blanchard of UNC Charlotte make this case in an October 2026 paper in Frontiers in Psychology. They recommend replacing topic-list agendas with question-based ones and sending them out 48 hours ahead. Their reasoning is that a question gives people something to think about before they walk in, which turns the meeting into a place to combine ideas rather than produce them from scratch. It’s worth knowing the limits: this is a conceptual paper built around science teams, and the authors say their recommendations haven’t been tested yet.
Still, compare “Q3 budget” with “Which two projects do we cut to stay within the Q3 budget?” The second one gets better answers. If your planning habits need a broader tune-up, our guide on how to be more organized at work has plenty more.
Give it a go: rewrite each item on your next agenda so it ends with a question mark.
5. Send the agenda and pre-reads early
This sounds obvious. It’s also skipped constantly.
Calendly’s State of Meetings 2024 report, published in October 2024 and based on a survey of 1,244 workers in the US and UK run by research firm Brand Over Matter, found that 37% of people said they don’t get pre-read materials or an agenda before external meetings, and 38% said the same about internal ones. That’s more than a third of meetings starting cold. (Calendly sells scheduling software, so treat its framing with a little care. The numbers are still telling.)
When people arrive without context, the first fifteen minutes become a briefing. That’s time you could have spent deciding.
Next time, do this: send the agenda and any reading at least a day ahead, and put the one question you most need answered in the first line of the email.
6. Start with a few minutes of silent reading
Amazon has run meetings this way for a long time. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, published in April 2018, Jeff Bezos explained that the company uses narrative six-page memos in place of slide decks, and that each meeting opens with everyone reading the memo silently, a kind of “study hall.” He was blunt about it: “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon.” He also argued that a really good memo can take a week or more to write.
Why does it work? Pre-reads only help if people actually read them, and many won’t. Building reading time into the meeting itself guarantees that everyone is working from the same page, literally. It’s one company’s practice and not a controlled study, so it may be overkill for a 20-minute check-in. For a big decision, it’s worth borrowing.
A quick experiment: for your next decision meeting, write a one-page summary and give everyone the first five minutes to read it before anyone speaks.
7. Schedule around people’s best focus hours
The hours when people think best are the same hours most meetings land on.
Microsoft’s June 2025 Work Trend Index report found that half of all meetings take place between 9 and 11 a.m. and between 1 and 3 p.m., which the company identifies as peak productivity windows. In other words, meetings tend to eat the very stretches of the day that deep work needs. Microsoft is describing patterns in its own product data here, so your team’s rhythm may differ, but it’s a useful prompt to check.
Look at your team’s calendars for a week, notice when people do their hardest work, and move routine syncs to the edges of the day, such as late morning just before lunch or mid-afternoon after 3 p.m.
8. Make shorter the default
Many tools default to 30 or 60 minutes. Neither number is magic.
There’s now some recent evidence on where the fatigue line sits. In a study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology in August 2025, Hadar Nesher Shoshan of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Wilken Wehrt of Maastricht University tracked 125 workers in Germany for ten working days, covering 945 meetings. As the University of Mainz summary of the Zoom fatigue study explains, they found no general “Zoom fatigue”: video meetings weren’t more draining than other meetings, and video meetings shorter than 44 minutes were actually less exhausting. The data was self-reported and came from a single country, so it isn’t the final word.
Even so, 44 minutes is a handy ceiling to keep in mind.
Test it this week: shorten one standing hour-long meeting to 40 minutes and see if anything important gets lost.
9. Leave buffers between meetings
Back-to-back meetings feel efficient. Your brain doesn’t agree.
Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab tested this in March 2021. Fourteen volunteers wore EEG caps through four 30-minute video meetings in a row on one day, and through the same four meetings separated by 10-minute meditation breaks on another. Without breaks, beta-wave activity, which is linked to stress, climbed steadily across the two hours and spiked at each transition. With breaks, it stayed level, and the brain patterns associated with engagement looked healthier. The mechanism is fairly intuitive: each meeting leaves some leftover tension, and with no gap to let it settle, it builds on top of the next. The caveat is a big one, though. Fourteen people is tiny, and this was an internal study, not a peer-reviewed paper.
Those ten minutes are also a good moment for a breathing reset, and our article on how to calm your nervous system has a few that fit in that window.
Here’s a simple way in: book 25 minutes instead of 30 and 50 instead of 60. Outlook and Google Calendar both have a setting that does this for you automatically.
10. Stand up for short huddles
For quick check-ins, take the chairs away.
Andrew Knight and Markus Baer of Washington University in St. Louis tested this in a 2014 study in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Teams spent 30 minutes making a university recruitment video, some in rooms with a table and chairs and some in rooms with no chairs at all. The standing teams showed more physiological arousal, measured with wrist sensors, and members said their teammates were less protective of their own ideas. That lower territoriality led to more sharing and better-rated videos. It’s a single lab study and more than a decade old, so think of it as a nudge rather than a law.
Daily stand-ups got their name for a reason. Keep them standing and they tend to stay short.
11. Make room for a little small talk
Chit-chat before a meeting can seem like wasted time. It isn’t.
Joseph Allen and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock surveyed 252 working adults for a 2013 paper in PERSONALquarterly and found that small talk before a scheduled meeting was linked to more effective meetings. They describe a “ripple effect”: the mood and connection people build in those first few minutes carry into the meeting itself. Here’s how that chain plausibly works. A minute of friendly talk lowers social tension, lower tension makes people more willing to speak, and more voices mean better information on the table. Keep in mind this is survey data, so it shows a link, not proof that small talk causes better meetings.
If small talk feels awkward for you, our guide on how to be good at small talk can help.
Try it Monday: open the room or the call three minutes early and ask one easy, non-work question as people arrive.
12. Start on time, every time
Waiting for latecomers punishes the people who showed up.
In a study published in Cross-Cultural Research in February 2025, Joseph Allen, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Steven Rogelberg and colleagues asked 1,432 working adults in Chile, China, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and the US how they’d react to someone arriving 5, 10 or 15 minutes late. The 2025 cross-cultural meeting lateness study found that lateness was treated as a stressor in all six countries. Reactions were stronger in cultures with higher power distance and a more collectivist outlook, where showing up late was read as a bigger breach of the rules. The study used imagined scenarios, not real meetings, but the frustration it captures is easy to recognize.
If you’re leading, you set the norm. Start at the stated time and recap for latecomers later, not in the moment.
Before your next call: decide now that you’ll begin at the minute on the invite, even if only two people are there.
13. Check your audio and tech before you start
Bad audio quietly ruins meetings, and it usually takes only a minute to prevent.
The same 2024 Microsoft study by Hosseinkashi and colleagues found that call quality problems were tied to sharply lower odds of a meeting being rated effective (an odds ratio of roughly 0.1) and lower odds of it feeling inclusive. Connection problems were also linked to much less participation. A simpler gadget made a difference too: people wearing a headset had about 20% higher odds of speaking up. These are associations from real meetings, not experiments, but the size of the call quality effect is striking.
So test the room, the screen share and the mic before people join. Ask remote folks to use a headset if they have one, and keep a dial-in number handy for when Wi-Fi gives up.
14. Give someone the job of pulling it all together
Good meetings usually have someone steering. That person doesn’t always need to be the boss.
In their October 2026 Frontiers in Psychology paper, DiazGranados, Allen and Blanchard suggest a rotating “Integrator” role. That person’s job is to draw out different viewpoints and then help the group join them into a shared answer. They also recommend that a new team spend its first meeting building relationships and agreeing on its own rules of engagement. As with their agenda idea, this is an expert proposal built on existing research, not something they’ve tested in the field, and they note it may be harder in strongly hierarchical teams.
Rotation has a side benefit. People who’ve had to integrate a messy discussion tend to behave better when it’s someone else’s turn.
Your move: at the start of your next meeting, name one person whose only job is to summarize where the group has landed before you move to the next item.
15. Don’t let one voice run the room
Most of us have sat through a meeting that was really one person’s monologue with an audience.
A 2021 meta-analysis in PNAS by Christoph Riedl, Young Ji Kim, Pranav Gupta, Thomas Malone and Anita Williams Woolley pooled 22 studies covering 5,349 people in 1,356 groups. It found that groups have a measurable “collective intelligence,” and that how members collaborate predicted it about twice as strongly as the individual skills of the people in the room. Members’ social perceptiveness, their ability to read each other, mattered too. In plain terms, a group of smart people talking over each other can lose to a group of average people who take turns and listen.
If you’re the one who tends to jump in, our article on how to stop interrupting people when they talk is a good place to start.
One small change: when someone has spoken three times on an item, thank them and ask, “Who hasn’t weighed in yet?”
16. Draw quiet people in early
Quiet doesn’t mean nothing to say. Often it means nobody made space.
Speaking up turned out to be the single strongest predictor of feeling included in the 2024 Microsoft study by Hosseinkashi and colleagues. People who participated vocally had about four times higher odds of rating a meeting as inclusive. Meetings where everyone spoke were rated slightly more effective (about 1.8%) and more inclusive (about 2.6%). Those last effects are small and correlational, but the link between having a voice and feeling part of the meeting is strong.
Picture this, as a hypothetical: you notice that Priya, the newest analyst, hasn’t spoken in two meetings. So you message her the day before, ask what she thinks about item two, and then open that item by saying, “Priya had a sharp take on this, so let’s start with her.” She speaks, and now she knows the door is open.
Quick rounds help too. Going around the table once at the start of a discussion lowers the bar for everyone.
17. Get ideas on paper before anyone discusses them
Group brainstorming has a built-in bottleneck: only one person can talk at a time.
While someone else speaks, you’re holding your idea in your head, half-listening and waiting for a gap. Some ideas fade before you get to say them. Others get dropped because the loudest idea has already set the direction. Brainwriting removes that bottleneck by letting everyone write at once. Paul Paulus and colleagues tested a version with 57 employees at a global technology company, published in Human Factors in 2015. Alternating eight minutes of solo writing with three-minute group reviews produced about 71% more ideas per person per minute than a standard group session. It was a small, exploratory study, and it’s now more than a decade old, but it fits well with earlier lab work on the same problem.
Give it a go: next brainstorm, ask for five minutes of silent writing on sticky notes or a shared doc before anyone says a word.
18. Turn complaints into proposals
Venting feels good for a minute. In meetings, it spreads.
Simone Kauffeld and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock studied the meetings of 92 teams in 20 midsized companies for a 2012 study in Small Group Research. Complaining and criticizing were particularly harmful. They lowered member satisfaction and team productivity, and they could set off “complaining cycles” where one gripe triggers the next. Negative behaviors had a bigger effect on how meetings went than positive ones. Teams that framed problems around possible solutions did better, and so did their companies, based on ratings collected up to two and a half years later.
You don’t have to ban frustration. Just redirect it.
Next time, do this: when a complaint lands, ask, “What would you suggest we try?” and write the answer down. If a discussion turns genuinely heated, our guide on how to deal with angry people has calmer tactics.
19. Decide how you’ll decide
Plenty of meetings end with everyone thinking a decision was made, and nobody agreeing on what it was.
McKinsey’s April 2019 global survey of 1,228 respondents found that respondents spent an average of 37% of their working time on decision making, and 61% said most of that time was used ineffectively. Only 20% said their organization excelled at decisions. The organizations that did best were 2.3 times more likely to use rigorous debate for big bets and 4.5 times more likely to have an effective process and meetings for decisions that cut across teams. The survey is more than seven years old and relies on self-reports, so take the multiples as direction, not precision.
Real debate needs people who can disagree without things getting personal, which is what our article on how to be tolerant of people’s opinions is about.
Start small: at the top of any decision item, say who makes the final call and whether you’re looking for input, consensus or a vote.
20. Be deliberate about cameras
Cameras-on-always isn’t a neutral rule. It costs some people more than others.
Kristen Shockley of the University of Georgia and colleagues ran a field experiment with 103 employees of a US health care services company, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2021. For two weeks, half kept cameras on in meetings and half kept them off, and then they swapped. Having the camera on led to more daily fatigue, and that fatigue in turn reduced how much people spoke up and how engaged they felt. The effects were stronger for women and for newer employees. That study ran during the pandemic, and the 2025 Mainz study in item 8 found that video meetings in general are no longer more draining, so the picture is more mixed today. Meanwhile, the Microsoft CSCW study found that in small meetings of 30 minutes or less, having video on for at least 30% of the call went with slightly higher participation.
So there isn’t one right answer. What matters is choosing on purpose.
Make cameras expected for small, short, discussion-heavy meetings and optional for big updates. When you’re on camera, our piece on how to make eye contact without staring explains how to look engaged on a screen.
21. Respect time zones and protect evenings
Global teams often fix scheduling clashes by quietly pushing meetings into someone’s evening.
Microsoft’s June 2025 Work Trend Index report found that nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones, up 35% since 2021, and that meetings after 8 p.m. rose 16% year over year. The report also counts large meetings with 65 or more attendees as the fastest-growing meeting type. These are patterns in Microsoft’s own platform data, and they won’t match every company, but the trend points in one direction: more meetings are leaking outside the normal workday.
If the same two people keep taking the 9 p.m. slot, call it what it is: a fairness problem.
A quick experiment: for your next recurring cross-time-zone meeting, rotate the time so the inconvenient slot moves around the team, and record the session for anyone who can’t join live.
22. Design hybrid meetings for the people on the screen
In a hybrid meeting, the people in the room usually have the better seat.
Microsoft Research’s Payod Panda, Lev Tankelevitch, Sean Rintel and colleagues looked at this in a paper published in the ACM CSCW proceedings in late 2024. They summarize earlier research showing that in-room participants often overlook remote colleagues and that remote people tend to become more passive. In their own study, remote participants in a standard gallery-view setup reported significantly lower agency and sense of being present together than the people in the room. The study was testing a new room design, so its sample is small and specific, but the gap it measured matches what many hybrid workers will recognize.
One workaround some teams swear by: if one person is remote, everyone joins from their own laptop. It sounds extreme, yet it puts everyone on the same footing.
Test it this week: in your next hybrid meeting, call on remote participants first for each item, and assign one person in the room to watch the chat.
23. Close with owners and deadlines
A meeting without clear next steps is mostly a conversation.
In the Calendly State of Meetings 2024 survey of 1,244 US and UK workers, about 40% said they don’t receive follow-up notes or action items after meetings, for both internal and external meetings. That means a large share of decisions leave the room without a name or a date attached. And an action item without an owner tends to belong to nobody.
The fix is a short closing ritual. Spend the last five minutes reading every action item aloud with one owner and one due date, and ask each owner to confirm. If following through is your own weak spot, our post on how to beat procrastination can help.
24. Send the recap the same day
Memory starts slipping almost as soon as the meeting ends.
The classic evidence comes from Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve in the 1880s, and in 2015 Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros of the University of Amsterdam replicated it in PLOS ONE. Their single participant spent 70 hours learning and relearning lists, with retention tested at intervals from 20 minutes to 31 days, and the results closely matched Ebbinghaus’s original curve. The logic for meetings follows. Details fade fast in the first hours and days, so a recap sent the next week records what people half-remember, not what was agreed. Fair warning: one subject memorizing lists is a long way from a team meeting, so this shows how memory decays in general, not how meeting notes behave specifically.
If remembering details is a struggle for you in general, our guide on how to improve your memory is worth a look.
Here’s a simple way in: write the recap in the last five minutes of the meeting, with everyone watching the screen, and send it before you close the call.
25. Use AI notetakers as a backup, not a stand-in
AI notetakers are useful. They can also become an excuse to skip the meeting.
A survey from Software Finder, reported by TechRadar in November 2025, found that 19% of workers frequently use AI tools to take meeting notes, and 29% said they had skipped meetings and left them to the AI, rising to 43% among Gen Z. Nearly half (48%) worried about inaccuracy and loss of nuance. The survey didn’t publish its sample size or methods, so treat the exact numbers loosely. Those accuracy worries have some research behind them, too. In a paper presented at the COLING 2025 conference in January 2025, Frederic Kirstein, Terry Ruas and Bela Gipp annotated 200 automatically generated meeting summaries across nine types of error, including omissions and irrelevant content, and concluded that language models still struggle with relevance and hallucination.
Let the tool draft, then have a human check it. Decisions, owners and dates are exactly the parts you can’t afford to get wrong.
Try it Monday: before you send an AI-generated summary, read the action items line by line against your own notes.
26. Treat your one-on-ones as real meetings
One-on-ones are the meetings managers most often run on autopilot.
Economists Silvia Castro, Florian Englmaier and Maria Guadalupe ran a randomized trial at the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, described in MIT Sloan Management Review, involving more than 1,000 teams and over 7,000 people. Some managers were encouraged to hold regular one-on-ones focused on what mattered to each employee and where they needed support. Others focused on task execution. In their working paper, last revised in May 2025, the needs-focused meetings raised psychological safety, while the task-focused version only helped teams that already had moderate safety. It hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, so hold it a little loosely. Steven Rogelberg’s 2024 book Glad We Met points the same way. According to a July 2024 Psychology Today summary, his survey of 4,000 people found nearly half said their one-on-ones had little value, and agendas written by the employee were rated best.
The lesson: let the other person set the agenda, and ask about them before asking about their task list. Our guide on how to be a good boss goes deeper on that kind of leadership.
27. Ask people to rate the meeting
You’re probably not the best judge of your own meetings.
Rogelberg’s survey of more than 1,300 Verizon employees, reported in his 2019 book The Surprising Science of Meetings and summarized by Quartz, found that 79% rated meetings they had organized as extremely or very productive. For meetings someone else ran, that figure fell to 56%. Rogelberg puts the gap down to self-inflation bias. People who lead or talk most simply experience a meeting more positively. The study is older and from a single company, but the bias it points to is easy to fall into.
Asking for feedback on something you run takes a bit of nerve. Our article on how to ask for feedback from your manager works just as well in reverse.
Before your next call: add a one-question poll at the end, “How useful was this, 1 to 5, and what one thing would make it better?” and read the answers.
28. Take some conversations for a walk
Not every meeting needs a table. Some go better on foot.
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford ran four experiments with 176 people for a 2014 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. In one, people’s creative output rose by an average of 60% when they walked compared with when they sat. Walking outdoors also helped people come up with novel analogies. There was a catch: on a task with one correct answer, walkers did slightly worse than sitters.
That points to a simple rule. Walk when you want ideas, and sit when you need precision.
One small change: turn your next one-on-one or two-person brainstorm into a 20-minute walk, and save the spreadsheet review for the desk.
29. Protect meeting-free time
The final tip is about the time you don’t spend in meetings.
Ben Laker, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar and Ashish Malik studied 76 companies that had introduced no-meeting days, and reported in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2022 that two meeting-free days a week went with 71% higher productivity, 55% more cooperation and 52% higher satisfaction. These are self-reported figures from a magazine article, not a peer-reviewed trial, so read them as a strong signal rather than a precise forecast. The 2025 Romney paper from item 1 adds a useful twist: in that same 76-company study, cutting meetings by 40% was linked to the productivity gain, while eliminating them altogether hurt productivity, engagement and satisfaction. The goal is fewer, better meetings, not zero.
Focus time is where hard problems get solved, which is exactly what our piece on how to enter the flow state is about. Block one afternoon a week as meeting-free for your whole team, and decline anything that lands there.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. A crisis week arrives, the agenda doesn’t go out, and you find yourself in four back-to-back calls with no breaks. That’s normal.
New routines take longer to stick than most people think. A December 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Healthcare by Singh, Murphy, Maher and Smith pooled 20 studies with 2,601 participants and found that health habits took a median of roughly 59 to 66 days to form, with individual cases ranging from 4 to 335 days. Those were health behaviors, not meeting habits, so treat the numbers as a rough guide. The broader point carries over, though: one bad week doesn’t undo two months of practice.
When you notice you’ve drifted:
- Pick one habit to restore first, usually the agenda or the closing action items, rather than all 29 at once.
- Check your calendar on Friday and cancel or shorten one meeting for the following week.
- Tell your team what you’re resetting. Saying it out loud makes it easier to stick to.
If a run of bad meetings has left you drained, our guide on how to turn a bad day around can help you reset before the next one.
Conclusion
Most of what makes a meeting work is unglamorous. It comes down to a handful of choices: meeting only when it’s needed, inviting the right few people, sending a clear question ahead, starting on time, giving every voice a turn and leaving with names and dates.
You don’t need to apply all 29 at once. Pick the two or three that would fix your worst meeting, and try them this week. Then ask your team whether they noticed.
For more practical advice on working life, browse our Work section.
