Barclays is cutting 5 percent of its work force as banks turn to A.I., amid growing pressure to prove the technology can bolster productivity and profits.
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 lionβs share of managersβ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of peopleβs 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 wasβ¦ not really. Meetings werenβt a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, βmeeting scienceβ 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 togetherβin caves, fields, market squares, and town hallsβto 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 βwith some goal or structure to the event,β 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.
Login
