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Science says your boss should talk less in meetings

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 lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.

全球每天举行近 10 亿次会议。首席执行官们将近四分之三的工作时间花在会议上。规划和主持会议占据了管理者大部分的时间。在许多工业化国家，会议既是人们工作生活的节拍器，也是一种困扰。

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 was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” 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.

鉴于在职场会议上花费了大量时间，我们是否知道它们达成了什么目标，或者如何让它们尽可能有价值？几十年来，答案是……并不真正了解。会议并不是一个容易研究的课题。但这种情况已经改变。曾经是一个极小的细分领域，“会议科学”正成为组织心理学家和社会心理学家中一个不断发展的专业。随着存档的虚拟会议提供了大量数据，该领域正在加速发展。它也为观察人类行为提供了一个迷人的窗口。

Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to 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 “with some goal or structure to the event,” 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.

通过会议进行交流有助于满足人类连接、沟通和合作的基本需求。长期以来，人们一直聚在一起——在洞穴、田野、市场广场和市政厅——为了完成某事、分享想法、达成共识，或者仅仅是谈论天气。但佛罗里达理工学院的组织心理学家 Liana Kreamer 表示，会议科学家将他们的研究对象定义为“具有某种目标或结构”的人员聚会。Kreamer 曾合著过一篇关于 2026 年《组织心理学与组织行为年度评论》中三十多年会议科学的回顾文章。

As a graduate student, Kreamer was interested in studying teamwork, leadership, and work relationships. During her doctorate work with meeting scientist Steven Rogelberg, she realized that meetings would be a fine venue for studying all of that and more. “You can use a meeting as a stage to study anything you want,” she says. After all, at their core “meetings are a fundamental aspect of how we organize and interact as social beings,” Kreamer and coauthors Rogelberg and Jon Gray, both of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, wrote in the 2026 article.

作为一名研究生，Kreamer 对研究团队合作、领导力和工作关系很感兴趣。在与会议科学家 Steven Rogelberg 一起攻读博士学位期间，她意识到会议是研究所有这些课题及更多内容的绝佳场所。她说：“你可以把会议当作一个舞台，去研究任何你想研究的东西。”毕竟，Kreamer 与北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校的合著者 Rogelberg 和 Jon Gray 在 2026 年的文章中写道，从本质上讲，“会议是我们作为社会存在如何组织和互动的一个基本方面。”

To tap meetings for study, researchers typically use two approaches. The first is a classic survey in which researchers retroactively ask people about their real or simulated meeting experiences and analyze the responses. The second method is to analyze specific behaviors and trends extracted from audio and video recordings of meetings. Such precise content is “where the music is,” says industrial and organizational psychologist Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, director of the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

为了利用会议进行研究，研究人员通常使用两种方法。第一种是经典的调查，研究人员回顾性地询问人们关于他们真实或模拟的会议经历，并分析这些回答。第二种方法是分析从会议音频和视频记录中提取的特定行为和趋势。德国汉堡大学“更好工作中心”主任、工业与组织心理学家 Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock 表示，这种精确的内容才是“真正的精髓所在”。

In one experiment, Lehmann-Willenbrock and colleagues extracted data from video-recorded meetings to study how leader communication affects team interaction during decision-making. The researchers found that respectful, attentive inquiry by meeting leaders enhanced team performance, in contrast to when leaders asked questions but didn’t attentively listen to responses.

在一项实验中，Lehmann-Willenbrock 和同事们从视频会议记录中提取数据，研究领导者的沟通如何影响决策过程中的团队互动。研究人员发现，会议领导者尊重且专注的询问能够提升团队表现，这与领导者提出问题却不认真倾听回答的情况形成了鲜明对比。

Leading with listening As with many meeting science studies, their findings about what improves meetings’ effectiveness often seem obvious, but meeting researchers note that meetings often stray far from these ideals. Such research also consistently reveals the importance of active listening, says Lehmann-Willenbrock: not just passive acknowledgement by the listener but actively providing thoughtful feedback. In virtual meetings, because “we’ve all learned to mute ourselves if we’re not talking, very often, active listening is killed completely.”

以倾听为导向：正如许多会议科学研究一样，关于如何提高会议效率的发现往往看起来显而易见，但会议研究人员指出，会议往往偏离了这些理想状态。Lehmann-Willenbrock 说，此类研究也一贯揭示了积极倾听的重要性：不仅仅是倾听者的被动确认，而是积极提供深思熟虑的反馈。在虚拟会议中，因为“我们都学会了在不说话时将自己静音，这往往会彻底扼杀积极倾听。”

The balance of listening and speaking also can influence how well a meeting goes. Meeting leaders and participants may retain very different views of whether a meeting was successful, notes Lehmann-Willenbrock. “Often, leaders talk the most, which is also why they often think their meetings are pretty good,” she says. Kreamer also emphasizes that it’s important that meeting leaders lead but not dominate the discussion. Leaders should monitor the proportion of time they are speaking to allow for inclusion of many voices.

倾听与发言的平衡也会影响会议的效果。Lehmann-Willenbrock 指出，会议领导者和参与者对于会议是否成功可能持有截然不同的看法。她说：“通常，领导者说得最多，这也是为什么他们往往认为自己的会议开得不错的原因。”Kreamer 也强调，会议领导者引导讨论但不主导讨论非常重要。领导者应监控自己的发言时间比例，以容纳更多的声音。

Research supports a checklist of additional things that leaders can do before, during, and after a meeting to make it a success, says Lehmann-Willenbrock. To set the stage, leaders should choose appropriate rooms, refreshments, and lighting, invite only those who need to be there, plan to start and end on time, prepare an agenda, set and communicate clear goals, and allow time for pre-meeting conversation.

Lehmann-Willenbrock 表示，研究支持一份清单，列出了领导者在会前、会中和会后可以做的额外事项，以确保会议成功。为了做好准备，领导者应选择合适的房间、茶点和照明，只邀请必要的人员参加，计划准时开始和结束，准备议程，设定并传达明确的目标，并留出时间进行会前交流。

Socializing first, especially in virtual meetings, is beneficial, Lehmann-Willenbrock says. Her research has shown that “for more introverted participants and more quiet participants, this warmup phase is really helpful because it helps them make more active contributions inside the meeting.” Indeed, her studies on face-to-face meetings have shown that pre-meeting small talk predicts meeting effectiveness, particularly for more introverted participants. But pre-meeting talk is rare in virtual meetings; she says leaders should consider establishing a norm of arriving early or using the first few minutes for an informal check-in.

Lehmann-Willenbrock 说，先进行社交，特别是在虚拟会议中，是有益的。她的研究表明，“对于更内向和更安静的参与者来说，这个热身阶段非常有帮助，因为它有助于他们在会议中做出更积极的贡献。”事实上，她对面对面会议的研究表明，会前闲聊可以预测会议的有效性，特别是对于更内向的参与者而言。但在虚拟会议中，会前交谈很少见；她说领导者应该考虑建立提前到达的规范，或者利用最初的几分钟进行非正式的签到。

Engaging attendees Facilitators can increase the likelihood of a successful meeting by making sure all opinions are heard. Kreamer recommends a technique called silent brainstorming to get all participants, even shy and reluctant ones, to engage in idea generation. It involves creating a shared virtual space, such as a chat or online document, to which all participants contribute simultaneously. Kreamer points to a 2009 study that found this approach (some researchers call it “brainwriting”) was more effective than traditional free-for-all spoken brainstorming in meetings. Kreamer uses this technique when she and her students are dreaming up research ideas in class. “We can all see each other working,” she says, and the quieter students don’t worry about interrupting or having to verbally express t

吸引参与者：引导者可以通过确保所有意见都被听到来增加会议成功的可能性。Kreamer 推荐一种称为“静默头脑风暴”的技术，让所有参与者，即使是害羞和不情愿的人，也能参与到想法的产生中来。它涉及创建一个共享的虚拟空间，例如聊天窗口或在线文档，所有参与者同时向其中贡献内容。Kreamer 指出，2009 年的一项研究发现，这种方法（一些研究人员称之为“书面头脑风暴”）比会议中传统的自由发言式头脑风暴更有效。Kreamer 在课堂上与学生构思研究想法时就会使用这种技术。她说：“我们都能看到彼此在工作，”而且比较安静的学生不必担心打断别人或必须口头表达 t