Admit It - You Like Meetings

While it's popular to disparage meetings - big waste of time, nothing ever gets done - some people actually like them. I personally like a good meeting - - but then I work in a job where communication is key. I receive about 100 emails each day, and send dozens - often to colleagues sitting only a dozen feet from me. Sometimes a good meeting gets more done - quicker - than all the darn emails.

There are many things to like about work — the collegiality, the productivity, the paycheck — but few people would include meetings in the list. Monotonous, time-consuming, often pointless, meetings can be to workdays what speed bumps are to main thoroughfares: annoying, well-intentioned impediments to progress.

Now researchers have examined how an endless series of meetings can affect employees' sense of well-being and job satisfaction. In a report published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers found that more people acknowledge meetings as a positive part of their days at work than they would ever publicly admit. LATimes - via Newmark's Door

These paragraphs sort of describe my workplace - which may be why I like meetings.

Overall, when the job specifically required group work, then employees generally found that meetings were useful. Employees who were part of a customer service team, for example, were more likely to have positive attitudes toward these necessary evils.

"When people are less task focused," says Rogelberg, "they allow the objectives of the day to emerge more naturally, so an interruption from a meeting is not so disruptive."