Admit It: You Heart Meetings

A recent column in The Wall Street Journal focuses on a new academic study due to be published later this year that found that many people who claim to loathe meetings secretly love them:

Steven Rogelberg, a professor of industrial organizational psychology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a group of colleagues found that among people surveyed about their last meeting, 69% rated them at least “good,” while only 16% rated them “poor” or worse. And although 50% said they complained about meetings, more than 60% of these complainers admitted that they either “don’t mind them that much” or “enjoy them.”

Asked what their ideal work day would look like, two-thirds of respondents said it would include at least one or more meetings.

The disparity between public distaste toward meetings and private affection is likely due to the stigma attached to admitting you like them. It’s declaring yourself either a show-off or a sheep — and definitely a time-waster. “If you say that you dislike meetings, you’re able to latch on to this rugged individualism,” Prof. Rogelberg says.

In truth, the columnist, Jared Sandberg, suggests, “the same person who disparages meetings — an exercise as easy as shooting fish in a barrel — sometimes secretly thinks they can be productive, can be a totem of status or, at the very least at the very least, can be a great forum for the latest joke material.”

So ‘fess up, you big fakers.