Meeting science expands as virtual archives yield data on workplace gatherings

Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world, according to the report. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings, and planning for and spearheading meetings takes up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, Ars Technica said, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.

For decades, the report said, it was not really known what meetings accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible. Meetings were not a particularly accessible subject of study. That has changed. Meeting science is now a growing specialization, and the field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. The report described the field as providing a window into human behavior.

Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate and cooperate, according to Ars Technica. 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 remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject more narrowly.

Organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of more than three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, said meetings are gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” according to the report.