Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Bored Meetings

Ah yes - another beginning of semester meeting. Rather than gripe about it, I'll just point you to an article in today's Guadian titled
Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg think you should think again. In a newly published study, they say: "We propose that despite the fact that meetings may help to achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings per day may have negative effects on the individual."

Luong is an assistant professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Rogelberg is an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Their report appears in the journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice.

...The results speak volumes. "It is impressive," Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, "that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found". Their central insight, they say, is the concept of "the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals".

Read the whole thing here.

I'll just file this in the folder marked "Duh". Other than my department chair, I don't know of many people who think meetings are a productive use of time.

HT: BusinessPundit

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