Meeting practices: an overlooked factor in a company’s attractiveness?

Salary, flexibility and career prospects are familiar features of an attractive job offer. But what about the meetings that will fill an employee’s working week?

New research by Kristen du Bois (EDHEC) and her co-authors suggests that the way an organization runs its meetings can influence whether prospective employees want to work there in the first place.

In a forthcoming publication in Group & Organization Management, they examine how meeting practices shape candidates’ perceptions of a job. Their findings highlights that the frequency of meetings can make a position less appealing, while something as simple as sharing meeting agendas in advance can make an organization more attractive.

Meet less, hire more

To examine this issue, the researcher conducted an experiment involving 557 employees, who evaluated a total of 2,785 hypothetical job offers. The offers varied in their meeting arrangements - including meeting frequency, duration, setting and preparation - alongside other traditional job characteristics such as pay and commuting time.

The results point to a clear pattern: meeting frequency matters to prospective employees. Their willingness to accept a job offer was already significantly lower when the position involved more than one meeting per week. For jobs requiring five or more meetings each week, this reduction was nearly twice as large.

Why might frequent meetings make a job less appealing? The findings suggest that people anticipate a heavier workload, greater emotional demands and more time pressure when a job involves five or more meetings per week. In other words, meetings are not seen as neutral elements of the working day. They can be interpreted as signs of what the job will demand.

This is an important distinction. The issue is not simply that employees dislike meetings. Rather, the meeting practices described in a job offer help candidates form expectations about the working environment they are entering, and about the demands they may face once they are in the role.

Interestingly, meeting duration produced a more nuanced result. Longer meetings increased the demands participants anticipated, but did not reduce their willingness to accept the job. One possible explanation is that candidates may regard longer meetings as necessary for complex decisions or work requiring substantial coordination. Frequency, by contrast, may be a more immediate signal of how much of the working week will be taken up by meetings.

A job worth meeting for? The agenda makes the difference

The study also highlights a meeting practice that can make a job more attractive: providing meeting agendas in advance.

When prospective employees were told that meetings would have agendas prepared beforehand, their willingness to accept the job increased. This seemingly modest detail appears to communicate something broader about the organization. Specifically, participants associated this practice with a more resource-rich working environment: one offering greater social support, feedback, autonomy and opportunities to exert influence.

This points to a central insight of the research: meetings can signal both demands and resources. Frequent meetings may suggest pressure on employees’ time and energy. Meetings prepared in advance, on the other hand, may signal that the organization values employees’ time and gives them the information they need to contribute.

This perspective echoes a wider body of research on workplace meetings. Studies have linked meeting quality and effective time management with employee satisfaction and engagement, while poorly managed meetings can contribute to strain. The question, then, is not simply how many meetings an organization holds, but what those meetings are for, how they are prepared and how people are able to participate.

For organizations, this has implications beyond meeting efficiency. Recruitment materials typically emphasize salary, benefits, flexibility, remote-working arrangements and career opportunities. Yet the everyday organization of work - including how teams meet - may also shape a candidate’s impression of the employer. It therefore deserves a place in the conversation about job attractiveness, alongside more familiar benefits.

Making meeting practices part of the employer value proposition

The findings offer managers a practical starting point: take a closer look at the meeting experience their organization creates, and consider what it communicates to current and prospective employees.

First, keep meeting frequency proportionate to actual coordination needs. This does not mean eliminating meetings or imposing a universal limit. Some roles require frequent interaction; others do not. The aim is to distinguish meetings that genuinely help people coordinate and make decisions from those that have become routine. Organizations that offer meeting-free days or weeks, for example, could present these practices as part of their employee proposition. They might also make their typical meeting arrangements clearer during recruitment.

Second, make preparation visible. Sharing agendas in advance is a relatively simple practice, but the research suggests that it can send a positive signal. It indicates that meetings have a purpose and that participants are expected to contribute meaningfully. Explaining how meetings are prepared and organized during a recruitment process may help candidates understand what working in the organization will actually look like.

Quality of participation matters too. Clear objectives, relevant discussions and room for employees to speak up make meetings more useful. Sharing documents in advance, inviting only those who need to attend and appointing a facilitator also help. Some organizations are going further, with written decisions and asynchronous exchanges to cut unnecessary meetings.

Promising signals, open questions

There are, however, important limits to what the study can establish. The experiment used hypothetical job offers in a controlled setting. Future research will need to examine whether the same effects appear when people make decisions about actual vacancies and job offers. Meeting practices may also matter differently depending on the availability of alternative jobs, the nature of the work and individual preferences. Moreover, although participants’ anticipated demands help explain some of their reactions, they do not account for the whole effect.

Even so, the research raises a question that employers may have overlooked for too long: what does the way we meet tell people about the way we work?

For millions of workers, meetings are not an occasional interruption; they are part of the everyday experience of a job. Organizations devote considerable attention to making their offers attractive. Paying attention to the meeting practices behind those offers may be another way to show candidates and employees what kind of working environment they can expect.

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