More Answers... (9/14/25 Newsletter): The Profound Purpose of Meeting Purpose

Hi Everyone,

Here's the blog version of the Sunday Evening "More Answers..." to get a friendly boost to setup your work week! 

Remember to sign up for the newsletter for bonus material!! (https://www.askchrista.com/newsletter/)

This could have been an email...

We’ve all been there: an invite lands in your inbox, the title is vague, no agenda, and you stare at it thinking: why am I being asked to attend this? 

Our time is precious-- or is it? Every meeting that lands in our inbox is another notch in our clock, and we've been conditioned to believe that it's OUR burden as requested attendees to determine whether we should attend... and it's also our burden to politely determine how to decline when it becomes clear we, well... shouldn't attend. 

This week’s topic is simple but powerful: meetings should come with purpose. And meeting owners should shoulder the burden of making that purpose clear with the option to opt-out or swap-out based on the why of their meeting (see Episode 35 "How Can I Run Meetings Better?").  

When meeting purpose isn’t clear, we're at a higher risk of wasting our time, losing focus, and slowly momentum of good work. 

And when meeting purpose is clear, everything shifts: people show up ready to rock-n-roll, time is focused, decisions move faster, and the hardest problems get solved better.

Backed by Evidence (and yet SO DIFFICULT to improve...)

There is plenty of empirical evidence that supports why better meeting management is better for an organization-- and none of us needs the research. We've all felt it.

And yet, it remains a common and costly mistake when companies do not implement better meeting norms and behaviors. 

Here's some of the numbers from formal research and applied research used in regular 'ol business articles:

• Employees spend a lot of their workweeks engaged in meetings. In one study, about 70% of all meetings kept people from completing their work tasks (Laker et al., 2022).

• In another, organizations reported employees spend around 31 hours per month in meetings — and about half of that time is wasted because meetings lack clear value, structure, or relevance (Diena, 2023).

• Research on meeting overload shows that when meetings are frequent, vague, or without clear goals, decision-making suffers, cognitive load increases, and productivity actually drops (Smith, 2024).

• A planning-and-leadership framework for meetings emphasizes that every meeting should start with defined objectives, clear alignment on who needs to attend (and why), and explicitly stated expected outcomes (LeBlanc & Nosik, 2019).

Clear Benefits to Communicating a Meeting Purpose in the Invitation

The best meetings are well-designed. They are thoughtfully designed. They are respectfully designed.

They are created by a meeting owner who starts from a place of requesting for attendee time; a meeting owner who understands that the attendees have other priorities; a meeting owner who deeply believes that the attendees can and should opt-out or swap-out if they aren't the best or right fit to support the purpose.

It also doesn't take much or take long to convey a clear purpose for your meeting, and if it takes you a while to type of the purpose of your meeting, that should tell you all you need to know about whether you should be having it in the first place.

The burden of using other people's time rests on the shoulders of the meeting owner, and yet many of us work at workplaces that think and behave the exact opposite: that attendees have the burden of attending any meeting that goes onto their schedule.

Meetings without purpose are as bad as they sound, and those who attend show up under an assumed obligation, unprepared to add any value. How could they? 

They have no idea why they were asked to attend.

Think about that. (we've all been there)

The Impact of Meetings without Purpose

When a meeting’s purpose isn’t clear, people attend by default, even if they aren’t really needed. 

OR, they may decline when they actually need to be there. 

A meeting culture with a chronic lack of purpose leads to eventual disengagement, distraction, lack of respect for time, and a meeting fatigue that hurts productivity. 

Precious meeting time is wasted clarifying scope or catching up attendees who weren’t sure why they were asked to attend. 

You may even experience a quiet hostility, [attendee raises hand], "Um... why am I here?"

No one should ever be "that person" who asks people to attend a meeting and yet no one knows why they're there. 

Meeting Clarity and Good Invitation Habits (people will love your meetings...) 

Here are some tips and tricks to lead your meetings with purpose, starting with the invitation-- and trust me, your meetings will become fast favorites.

• Every invitation includes a purpose statement: in the calendar invite list a purpose. Even better, list objectives and a few topics: context, why the meeting is important, what’s being decided, discussed, or aligned. If you can’t state that, ask: should this be a meeting or an email? (make a joke of it, too!)

  Limit attendee list: each person on the invite should be there for a reason (info sharing, decision making, stakeholder input). If someone looks borderline, consider if they need a summary rather than the live meeting, and if you aren't sure: ask them. They'll appreciate it.

• Start and end with clarity: at the beginning and at the end, restate the purpose of the meeting. By "book-ending" the meeting, you are re-enforcing the brand of your meetings, which starts and ends with purpose.

• Allow opt-out or swap-outs (see Episode 35): when people are given “why I need to be here,” some may realize their attendance isn’t needed or someone else on their team may be a better fit for what you seek to accomplish. Again-- people will deeply appreciate this type of critical thinking and flexibility.

BOOSTER FOR YOUR WEEK!!!  

Think About Meetings as Part of Your Communication Strategy!

In Season 2 Episode 16, focused on a listener question for how to manage an interrupting boss, one of the additional resources I provided was an effective video from the "Communication Coach Alexander Lyon" YouTube Page.

Tonight I'm going to provide another one, but in this one he provides five tips for more productive and more enjoyable meetings. It will sound familiar, but I'm offering it as a quick way to reinforce a lot of what a best meeting management approach looks like.

And remember, if you have a business challenge or workplace issue... Ask Christa! 

REFERENCES

Diena, Y. (2023, June 24). Time wasted in meetings: 36 meeting statistics. https://www.ambitionsaba.com/resources/time-wasted-in-meetin...

Laker, B., Pereira, V., Malik, A., & Soga, L. (2022, March 9). Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings. https://hbr.org/2022/03/dear-manager-youre-holding-too-many-...

LeBlanc, L. A., & Nosik, M. R. (2019). Planning and leading effective meetings. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 12(3), 696–708. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-019-00330-z

Smith, D. (2024, October 21). How do meetings influence productivity? Flowtrace Ltd. https://www.flowtrace.co/collaboration-blog/how-do-meetings-...