Science says your boss should talk less in meetings

What happened

Researchers wrote a review of more than 30 years of research on meetings. It was published in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. The field that studies meetings is called meeting science. It was once a very small area of study, but it is growing fast.

Key facts

• About 1 billion meetings take place every day around the world.
• CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings.
• Planning and leading meetings takes up most of managers' time.
• Researchers now use archived virtual meetings, which give them lots of data to study.

Why meetings are hard to study

For a long time, meetings were hard to study. Now, online meeting records give scientists a huge amount of information. Meetings are a place where people connect, share ideas, and work together. Researcher Liana Kreamer says a meeting can be a useful stage for studying teamwork, leadership, and how people get along at work.

Why it matters

Meetings take up a huge part of working life. If scientists learn what makes a meeting worthwhile, workers could spend less time on wasted meetings and more time on work that helps. The study also shows how people behave when they come together to get something done.

What to watch

• More research on how to run meetings that get useful results.
• Whether companies change how they plan and lead meetings based on this research.
• How new data from virtual meetings helps scientists learn more about people at work.