Hallelujah. Although this will comes as no surprise to anyone in the corporate world, research shows that too many meetings are bad for both the employee’s state of mind and, because of that, corporate productivity. I particularly like the observation that if someone isn’t given a break from meetings that they take one anyway — it just is in the meeting. So, while the person’s body may be attending the meeting, the person’s mind is elsewhere.

All of this would seem obvious. Schools give children recesses for a reason. It is difficult to focus on a subject for terribly long and, in order to help the child’s retention, there is play break. Children come back from recess more energetic and ready to study. Somehow the work world has bought into the notion that adult human beings are somehow different from children human beings and thus can endure a day filled with meetings. They can not and the science shows this.

Multiple meetings in a work day is a relatively modern concept. When I started working in the1980’s, a day of back-to-back meetings was rare. People worked and the occasional meeting was held. Meetings were so rare that they were often accompanied with donuts or cookies. Sadly, the treats have been ditched and the meetings are innumerable and endless.

I blame computers. Now, I don’t have any proof but the more automated my company became, the more meetings the company seem to call. I am guessing this is because while human beings made mistakes with non-automated processes, the process itself very rarely changed. If mistakes were made, the employee may need retraining but the process stayed the same. With automation, on the other hand, procedures changed on a regular basis because there may be a problem with the automation. This meant that a workaround was needed to to keep the business running. People needed to talk about the workaround because one department could easily implement the change while the workaround would bring another department the brink of disaster. People understandably had to talk.

Automation brought a slew of meetings. People needed to know when the system was down and when it could be brought up. They needed to know that the system was performing certain functions incorrectly and what to do if you experienced it. They needed to know that the system was being updated and what information you needed to give your employees. Meetings and more meetings were the result.

Then teleconference came along and meetings, at least in my mind, went out of control. They became so frequent that some days I found myself in back-to-back meetings for days. I worked for a European company with a huge presence in Asia. I now began to have teleconferences at odd times – say 6AM in my morning. Last minute meetings became the bane of my existence. I could dutifully check my next day schedule for meetings before I left work each day and find a new meeting invitation on my calendar. Someone, while I was sleeping, decided to call a last minute teleconference. And I wasn’t that important of a person. The big wigs, more often than not, are behind closed doors for days on end.

I could live with this if the meetings were really necessary. But most of the time, they weren’t. There were check-ins. How are things going with this project? Fine. Do you have any questions or need my help? No. The meeting was over in 5 minutes which is really annoying after I carted my ass out of bed at 5AM in the morning. Or, worse still, I shouldn’t have been invited in the first place? I have sat through meetings in which I have sat quietly while people talked about something I knew nothing about, waiting patiently for my role to be revealed to discover that there was no reason whatsoever for me to be on this call. I once had someone claim that it was courtesy to keep me in the loop about the project. Why would anyone invite you to a meeting with no expectations that you have anything to contribute? I understood nothing that was said because I knew nothing about the project. If I was asked by anyone what the project was about, I could maybe recall the name and little else.

So, as you can see, I am happy to hear that people have begun to see the productivity issues related to too many meetings. Hopefully someone with power will take this new information seriously and tackle the proliferation of meetings. I am betting there will be a meeting coming to your Outlook calendar soon. Don’t thank me.