Meeting

The word "meeting" derives from Old English mēting, the act of encountering or coming together. Its root, mētan, meant to meet, find, or come upon, and described chance encounters as readily as planned ones.1 For centuries, a meeting was simply what happened when people found themselves in the same place.

The Quakers gave the word its first institutional meaning in the seventeenth century. A Quaker "meeting" was a regular gathering for worship, held in a "meeting house," with a structure defined by silence rather than by agenda.2

The corporate meeting arrived with the rise of large organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As companies grew beyond the span of a single owner's attention, managers needed a mechanism to coordinate action across departments. The regularly scheduled meeting, with a defined agenda, a set time, and an expected list of attendees, became that mechanism.3

Research on meeting frequency consistently finds that the number of meetings in organizations has grown over time. A study published in the Harvard Business Review in 2017 found that executives spent an average of twenty-three hours per week in meetings, up from fewer than ten hours in the 1960s.4

A word that once described the simple act of encountering another person now describes one of the most universal and least questioned rituals of organizational life.5