Meeting design characteristics and attendee perceptions of staff/team meeting quality.

Abstract

University of Minnesota DuluthMeetings are a common tool in organizations and are used for a variety of purposes andimplemented in a variety of ways. Despite the prevalence of meetings, surveys suggestthat they are often unproductive and costly. The current study focused on how meetingsare designed in hopes of providing practically and theoretically meaningful recommen-dations for improving meeting quality. A total of 18 design characteristics associatedwith staff/team meetings were identiÞed and their relevance to perceptions of meetingquality was tested. Using an online panel-based respondent pool of working adults, 367individuals participated in a survey that they completed within 48 hr of their mostrecent staff/team meeting. The results demonstrated that 9 of the design characteristics,spanning all 4 categories of design characteristics (i.e., temporal, physical, procedural,and attendee), signiÞcantly predicted perceptions of meeting quality. Furthermore, thisstudy validated and greatly extended previous research showing that agenda use,meeting punctuality, facility quality, and meeting facilitator status relate to meetingquality. In addition, this study identiÞed speciÞc relationships to meeting quality forseveral facility quality characteristics, including lighting, meeting space, refreshments,and temperature, and expanded our knowledge of key characteristics by identifyingagreement use and the number of attendees as important. Taken together, these Þndingssuggest that effective meeting design warrants holistic attention to all meeting aspects.These results were robust across demographics, including organizational type, gender,and supervisory status. Implications for meeting design are discussed.Keywords: meeting, quality, satisfaction, design, facilitator