Ross Executive Education Associate Dean Explores the Relationship Between Productivity and Meeting Schedules in New Research
While conversations surrounding best practices for meetings often center on making meetings effective and even reducing the frequency of meetings, new research from Gretchen Spreitzer, Professor of Management and Organizations and Associate Dean for Executive and Corporate Relations at the Ross School of Business, considers how the way meetings are scheduled can impact productivity.
In an article published in the Harvard Business Review, Gretchen and Chen Zhang, a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, and Zhaodong Qiu, a Ph.D. candidate at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, explore how the way meetings are scheduled and arranged on a daily basis can either support or hinder productivity and energy at work.
Through extensive observation of over 400 full-time knowledge workers across a diverse range of industries, they discovered that it's not just the total amount of time spent in meetings that affects energy but rather the relative proportion of meeting time compared to individual tasks. They also discovered that meetings and individual tasks can have a complimentary pressure effect on energy when structured appropriately, i.e., having a day filled with high-pressure individual tasks with low-pressure meetings and vice versa. Together, the researchers offer three different considerations that take a strategic approach to facing the challenge of everyday scheduling at work.
