Why do some people love meetings?

The issue with meetings is some are not run well and end up in a mire where, “People try to win points. They argue. They talk stuff to death. They are too long.”
The person that called the meeting should have an agenda posted before the meeting.
There should a set mission to be completed and anything off topic should be taken off line. Gatekeeper or chairman of the meeting is supposed to ensure that the meeting will be conducted orderly manner and a conclusion is met on the agenda when possible.
They should have and maintain a time limit for each person and item.
If possible there maybe a recording made of the telecon for review later by people unable to get to the phone, at the very least there should be minutes posted after the meeting / telecon.

Yes, I have set-up and run many, many corporate meetings.

I like meetings because I consider them a break from work.

I hate them because I feel they’re a waste of time. People at my workplace are on their cell phones playing during conference calls, while we discuss things, it’s a total waste of time.

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.”
― Dave Barry

Well one bonus, particularly in my field, is that people don’t tend to vomit buckets full of blood over you and die in them. So it often makes a nice change of pace. You can drink coffee in them as well and sometimes if your lucky there’s food.

My husband loves meetings because he gets to sit there for 90% of the time thinking about solutions to the issues he has to work with, because there is very little content involved.

I attend quite a lot of meetings. There are a small number of these meetings that are always very productive. I don’t mind those. We always achieve a lot.

Others I cannot stand. I’ve taken to taking my laptop with me and doing other work while surreptitiously doing other work.

The purpose of any meeting should be clear when the meeting is called. An informational meeting has one kind of purpose and a decision-making meeting another. How people are supposed to contribute should be understood by everyone. In the workplace, the best meetings are usually working meetings, where what’s to be accomplished is clearly defined at the outset and the process produces an outcome, even if only incremental, that wasn’t there when the session began.

A lot of meetings that I’ve attended were unfocused, and others seemed to be blame-fixing exercises masquerading as status reports.

Some decision-making sessions have been relentlessly democratic, with every little argument and question being heard ad nauseam, when some issues could just be decided by the leader and closed. Not every purpose is best served by religiously airing all points of view and hearing all voices. Facilitators and team leaders should know how to move a discussion along and quiet the ceaselessly vocal whiners.

A well-prepared leader seems to make an important difference.

One thing that I wish all meeting organizers would keep in mind is the principle of using meeting time only for things that it takes a meeting to accomplish. This would exclude, for example, fielding questions that only one person has and the answers to which don’t affect anyone else, and holding a group hostage as an audience for reports that someone simply wants to be able to say they presented, whether anyone cares or not.

There is a book called Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business. It provides information on how to hold effective meetings. The information provided should be common sense, but as most of us have learned, it isn’t.

Once our dept. adopted some of the recommended practices, I learned to appreciate and look forward to our regular meetings.