Meetings, meetings everywhere...
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's not unusual for office workers to complain about the number of meetings they have to attend, but are they a distraction from real work, as some claim? And why are we having more meetings than ever?
It's a question researchers at the University of Malmo in Sweden tried to answer. Patrik Hall, the university's professor of political science, tells us it has to do with the growing number of large organisations. The BBC's former Indonesia correspondent Rebecca Henschke tells us about meeting culture in that country, and Joseph Allen, professor of industrial and organisational psychology at the University of Utah, gives advice on how to make meetings more efficient.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, the trouble with meetings. |
| 0:08.7 | The more meetings you have, the more meetings you have to schedule for, because you discover problems in meetings. |
| 0:15.4 | And then you need more meetings to discuss these problems. But do we actually secretly love them? |
| 0:20.8 | I don't think people hate meetings as much as we like to say we do. |
| 0:23.9 | We are social creatures. |
| 0:25.1 | We are humans. |
| 0:26.2 | We like to interact with each other. |
| 0:28.1 | It's just not cool to say, yeah, I like meetings. |
| 0:30.5 | Plus tips on how to make meetings more bearable. |
| 0:33.7 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:40.7 | Do you want to start with that? bearable. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. It's 9.30 in the morning, which means that for our business news department here at the BBC, |
| 0:48.2 | it's meeting time, an editorial meeting where the team is discussing the day's news agenda, |
| 0:55.8 | deciding which stories to cover. |
| 1:02.8 | On a good day, it takes no more than 10 to 15 minutes. On a bad day, it can drag on for up to 40. |
| 1:08.1 | The team's now on to discussing topics that don't really affect this program business daily, but it would be a bit rude to walk out. |
| 1:14.4 | Luckily, I'm standing at the back of the room next to a window so I can look outside, |
| 1:21.1 | admire the grey London streets, or I might even just sneakily scroll through my phone and hope no one notices. |
| 1:23.6 | Manuel, do you mind we're trying to hold a meeting here? |
| 1:28.3 | Oops, the point is meetings are often the bane of an office worker's existence. That's not to say |
| 1:34.8 | they're all pointless, but many see meetings as a distraction from actually getting a job done. |
| 1:41.5 | Yet the evidence is we're having more meetings than ever before. |
| 1:45.6 | You know, we have these statistics that I like to spout about, you know, the U.S. has |
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