Few things in the modern workplace inspire as much collective groaning as the meeting. "This could have been an email" has become a universal workplace lament. Studies suggest that executives spend up to 23 hours per week in meetings, and employees consistently rank unnecessary meetings as one of their top workplace frustrations.
Yet meetings persist. Despite decades of complaints, despite the rise of email and messaging apps, despite remote work and asynchronous communication tools, organizations keep scheduling meetings. There must be a reason.
The meeting isn't a modern invention gone wrong. It's an ancient human behavior that serves deep organizational and psychological needs—even when it's done badly.
The Problem This Was Meant to Solve
The fundamental problem that meetings solve is coordination. When multiple people need to work together toward a common goal, they need some way to align their understanding, make collective decisions, and ensure everyone is moving in the same direction.
Written communication, while efficient, has limitations. It's asynchronous—responses take time. It lacks the real-time back-and-forth that allows for rapid clarification and negotiation. It's easy to misinterpret tone and intent. And it doesn't create the same sense of shared commitment that comes from gathering people together.
Before modern organizations, meetings served similar purposes in different contexts: tribal councils, town halls, religious gatherings, military briefings. Humans have always gathered to make decisions, share information, and build consensus. The workplace meeting is just the corporate version of this ancient practice.
How It Actually Came to Exist
The formal business meeting emerged alongside the modern corporation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As organizations grew larger and more complex, they needed structured ways to coordinate activities across departments and hierarchies.
Early management theorists like Frederick Taylor and later Peter Drucker emphasized the importance of communication and coordination in organizations. Meetings became the primary mechanism for achieving this. The conference room became a standard feature of office design, and meeting etiquette evolved into an unwritten corporate skill.
Technology has repeatedly promised to replace meetings but has instead often multiplied them. The telephone enabled conference calls. Video conferencing created virtual meetings. Calendar software made scheduling meetings easier than ever. Each innovation intended to improve communication ended up making meetings more accessible and therefore more common.
The proliferation of meetings accelerated in the knowledge economy, where work became less about individual tasks and more about collaboration. When a factory worker's output is measured in widgets produced, coordination needs are minimal. When a team's output is a strategy or a software product, constant alignment becomes necessary.
Why It Still Exists Today
Meetings persist because they serve functions that other forms of communication cannot easily replicate. Real-time, synchronous communication allows for immediate feedback, clarification, and course correction. Complex discussions that might take dozens of emails can be resolved in a single conversation.
Meetings also serve social and political functions in organizations. They're where relationships are built and maintained. They're where power dynamics are negotiated. They're where people demonstrate engagement and commitment. A team that never meets is often a team that lacks cohesion.
There's also the psychological dimension. Meetings create a sense of shared purpose and collective identity. They mark transitions—the kickoff meeting, the post-mortem, the quarterly review. They provide closure and create accountability in ways that asynchronous communication often doesn't.
The problem isn't that meetings exist—it's that they're often poorly run, unnecessarily frequent, or include too many people. The solution isn't eliminating meetings but making them purposeful and effective.
What People Misunderstand About It
The most common misconception is that meetings are inherently wasteful. This confuses bad meetings with all meetings. A well-run meeting with clear purpose, the right attendees, and efficient facilitation can accomplish more in 30 minutes than days of back-and-forth emails.
Another misconception is that technology will eventually make meetings obsolete. Every generation of communication technology has promised this, and every generation has failed to deliver. The reason is that meetings aren't just about information transfer—they're about human connection, real-time thinking, and collective decision-making. These needs don't disappear with new tools.
People also misunderstand why organizations have so many meetings. It's not because managers love meetings—it's because coordination costs scale with organizational complexity. A company with 10 people needs few meetings; a company with 10,000 needs many. This isn't dysfunction; it's math.
The meeting will persist because it solves problems that haven't been solved any other way. The challenge isn't to eliminate meetings but to use them wisely—as a tool for coordination and connection, not as a default response to every workplace need.