A Single Dial Called Speaking Time
Organizational psychologists have quietly turned the workplace meeting into a laboratory, and what they keep finding is almost embarrassing in its simplicity. One variable — how much the person in charge talks — swings the outcome more than the agenda, the room, or the slides. Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology and her colleagues reviewed more than three decades of this research in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and the pattern holds across studies: leaders who dominate the airtime tend to misjudge their own meetings as successful. [1] The reason is not mysterious. Everyone else hears a monologue with chairs.
The evidence for this is not anecdote. Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, director of the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg, and her team extracted behavior from video-recorded meetings to test how a leader’s communication shapes team decision-making. [2] Respectful, attentive inquiry — asking a question and then actually listening to the answer — improved team performance. The contrast case is the tell: leaders who asked questions but did not attend to the replies produced worse outcomes. The question was present; the listening was not. That gap between asking and hearing is where a meeting quietly fails, and it fails invisibly, because the person running it never notices.
A meeting is a strange kind of machine: its output depends less on what is put in than on how the input is distributed. Kreamer’s guidance follows directly from that — a leader should lead without dominating, and should monitor the share of time they personally occupy so that many voices can enter. This is a dial, not a switch. Turn it too far toward silence and the meeting loses direction; leave it wide open and the room becomes an audience.
The scale of what is at stake is easy to underestimate. Close to one billion meetings take place around the world every single day. Chief executives spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays inside them. For managers, planning and running meetings consumes the largest slice of the clock. In much of the industrialized world, meetings set the tempo of working life and also menace it — the metronome and the hazard in the same object. Given that volume, the long-standing absence of hard evidence about what meetings actually accomplish was a remarkable blind spot. Meetings were not an easy subject to study. That has changed, and the field once treated as a niche is now a growing specialization with archived virtual meetings supplying vast amounts of analyzable data.
Two Labs, One Conclusion
What makes the finding durable is that independent groups, using different methods and different populations, keep arriving at the same place. One line of work watches meetings. Lehmann-Willenbrock’s video-based analyses pull specific behaviors out of recordings, which she calls the place “where the music is” — the precise content that surveys cannot recover. A second line asks people afterward. Kreamer and Steven Rogelberg built a research program on retroactive surveys of real and simulated meeting experiences, and Kreamer’s framing is that a meeting works as a stage on which almost any workplace question can be studied. Two instruments, one verdict: attention and airtime are the levers.
The convergence extends to the design of the room itself. Lehmann-Willenbrock describes a checklist that spans before, during, and after: appropriate rooms, refreshments, and lighting; inviting only those who need to be there; starting and ending on time; a prepared agenda; clear goals set and communicated in advance; and time reserved for conversation before the formal start. None of this is exotic. What the research adds is that meetings routinely drift far from these ideals even though the ideals are obvious — the gap between knowing and doing is the actual finding. A checklist is only useful to someone willing to consult it while the clock runs.
The warm-up phase deserves special attention because it is where introverts are won or lost. Lehmann-Willenbrock’s studies of face-to-face meetings found that pre-meeting small talk predicts meeting effectiveness, particularly for more introverted participants. [2] The logic is simple: a few minutes of informal contact lowers the cost of speaking up later. In virtual meetings that warm-up almost never happens, because the technology invites people to arrive at the exact minute and leave at the exact minute. Her recommendation is to build the norm deliberately: leaders should establish a habit of arriving early, or use the first few minutes for an informal check-in. It is a small structural change with a measurable payoff, and it costs nothing but a decision.
Silent brainstorming is the other structural lever, and it solves a different problem: the meeting where the loudest person sets the frame before anyone else has formed a thought. Kreamer recommends a shared virtual space — a chat or an online document — where all participants contribute ideas at the same time. She points to a 2009 study finding this approach, sometimes called brainwriting, more effective than the traditional spoken free-for-all. She uses it with her own students when generating research ideas: everyone can see everyone working, and the quieter students are freed from the worry of interrupting or of having to say a suggestion out loud. After about ten minutes, she reviews the ideas with the group. The technique does not make people smarter; it removes the penalty that speaking order imposes on the shy.
Virtual meetings carry a specific cost that the research is now pinning down. Because participants have learned to mute themselves whenever they are not talking, active listening — not passive acknowledgment but thoughtful feedback offered in return — is often killed completely. The mute button is a small invention with a large side effect: it turns a conversation into a sequence of broadcasts. The same technology that lets a thousand people join a call also strips out the micro-signals that tell a speaker whether anyone is actually with them. What looks like efficiency is often just the absence of feedback.
The Next Step: Mapping Who Gets Heard
The next verifiable step the research names is inclusiveness at the level of individual difference, and it is already underway in the work of Kreamer’s doctoral student Zofia Walters. Zofia Walters, a doctoral student in industrial organizational psychology working with Kreamer, has been studying the needs of neurodiverse participants. Her survey of 147 employees across a variety of workplaces asked about their most recent virtual meeting: how effective it was, how fatigued they felt afterward, their emotional state, how much they multitasked (answering email, for instance), how long their camera stayed on, and whether they had an ADHD diagnosis, formal or self-assessed. [1] In findings yet to be published, Walters reported that individuals with ADHD were more likely to feel meeting fatigue than their non-ADHD peers, especially when the camera was on for extended periods, and that they reported poorer emotional states. [1] Her results also suggest that multitasking during meetings may help ADHD attendees manage boredom or hyperactivity — a finding that reframes the distracted multitasker as someone self-regulating rather than someone checked out.
The practices Walters identifies are unremarkable on their face: minimizing distractions, documenting instructions, using shared calendars, building regular check-ins into meetings. Her evidence indicates these practices likely benefit all employees while being especially helpful for people with ADHD. That is the pattern the whole field keeps producing — the accommodation that helps the few turns out to be the design that helps the many. A meeting built for the person who struggles to hold attention in a long camera-on session is simply a better meeting.
The post-meeting phase is the last lever, and it is the one most often abandoned. Lehmann-Willenbrock and colleagues concluded in a 2018 paper in Organizational Dynamics that leaders can confirm a meeting was time well spent by communicating action items to participants, taking concrete steps to implement the ideas and tasks generated, and assessing employee engagement, meeting satisfaction, and meeting effectiveness. [2] A meeting that produces decisions nobody records and tasks nobody performs has not saved time; it has spent it twice. The follow-through is the proof of whether the dial was set correctly.
The cost side of the ledger is now documented too. Research has found that employees anticipate feeling worse and being less productive when their day is packed with meetings, particularly when they are working on complex tasks. Meetings are often treated as the default way to get things done, but people frequently do not specify what they want out of them, says cognitive scientist Ava Scott of the University of Copenhagen — which, in her words, “makes a lot of meetings feel very purposeless.” [3] Her research on Microsoft employees found that recurring meetings tend to be the most aimless of all; one participant described their content as dreamlike in its similarity from one instance to the next. [3] If there is no clear goal, and everyone is busy, that is a signal that the meeting is not the right instrument.
Some organizations have acted on this. Kreamer notes that companies such as Shopify have cut all recurring meetings outright. But the ledger is not one-sided. One possible explanation is that meetings offer the chance to interact with more senior colleagues, enabling the transmission of key knowledge. A 2026 study of more than 9,000 Norwegian workers, led by economist David Deming at Harvard University and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that meeting intensity is positively associated with later wage growth and on-the-job learning. [3] The study is correlational and cannot establish that attending more meetings causes wages to rise, but it does suggest that although the cost of meetings is especially high for high-wage companies, the benefits may be even higher. That led its authors to conclude: “Meetings are the broccoli of work — widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.” [3].
Humor is the final variable, and it behaves like salt — a little transforms the dish, too much ruins it. Used appropriately, humor can spur new ideas and enhance team performance, and Lehmann-Willenbrock reported after analyzing videos of meetings at two German companies that this works best when participants know each other well enough to feel safe making a joke. Authentic, supportive, or positive humor helps; demeaning humor does not. The privilege dimension is the uncomfortable part. Science educator and comedian Vita Stout, now at Sierra College in Rocklin, California, attended the International Congress for Bat Research in Austin, Texas, in 2022 and transcribed the jokes used in conference talks — exact quotes, their timing, and the audience response. Her research, coauthored with bat scientists and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, argued that well-timed humor in scientific meetings can be a tool for connection and community-building, but that joke-telling was more prominent among participants with privilege and power: older, well-established male scientists made jokes more frequently than early career researchers and scientists from underrepresented groups. The freedom to be funny is itself a resource, unevenly distributed.
Timing closes the loop back to the body. Scheduling should account for the human circadian rhythm and avoid meeting during the hours when attention is naturally lowest, such as the after-lunch dip — a reminder that the meeting is not only a social artifact but a biological event, run by people whose alertness rises and falls on a schedule no agenda can override. Put the dial, the warm-up, the silent brainstorm, and the follow-through together and the picture is coherent: a meeting is a system with a handful of adjustable parameters, and the one that matters most is how the time is shared.
Sources
Mentioned organisations (context, not sources)
- Florida Institute of Technology — Organisation (homepage)
- Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior — Organisation (homepage)
- University of Hamburg — Organisation (homepage)
- Organizational Dynamics — Organisation (homepage)
- University of Copenhagen — Organisation (homepage)
- Microsoft — Organisation (homepage)
- Shopify — Organisation (homepage)
- International Congress for Bat Research — Organisation (homepage)