Meetings consume significant organisation resources and are important for organisational success but attendees tend to consider them poor value for time. Many studies of meetings have focused on identifying correlational links between individual variables and meeting satisfaction. Few have studied meetings holistically leading to a lack of understanding on which to base systemic design of meetings. This research considers meetings as embedded in wider systems and studies them as a systems challenge. Eighteen knowledge workers were interviewed using a range of techniques to explore a meeting’s wider context and then a systems approach was used to analyse this context. The findings confirm that meetings are influenced by many factors from other systems including the organisation, the team, the work and the individuals. A rich picture identifies four non-clock stages of a meeting embedded in its wider context, including one stage not previously identified in the literature where attendees transition from their individual pre-meeting tasks to form a cohesive unit for the duration of the meeting. The rich picture identifies eight activities which underpin a holistic understanding of meetings, across the four stages, including Social Contracting which three studies’ findings show is important but under-represented in extant literature. A conceptual framework was developed from the findings and trialled with ten meeting hosts who confirmed that it helped them design meetings more systemically.
The conceptual framework provides a holistic picture of meetings which encourages and informs systemic meeting design. It also provides a deeper explanation for many of the individual design features that have been linked to meeting satisfaction and unifies meeting science literature with a common language and set of shared reference points. It emphasises the value of systemic meeting design, treating meeting design as a systems challenge – from which many of the future meetings we all attend will benefit.