Too Many Meetings? Scheduling Rules for Team Coordination

Workers in knowledge-intensive industries often complain of having too many meetings, but organizations still give little thought to deciding when or how often to meet. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency and robustness of various coordination scheduling rules. We consider a situation where workers are engaged in a common activity (e.g., software programming) that can be divided into largely independent, parallel production tasks, but that necessitates periodic coordination. Coordination enables workers to address issues they have encountered in their independent work, but takes time away from production. Using a stylized game-theoretic model, we show that small teams allow a more fluid, i.e., need-based, approach to coordination, such as preemptive coordination (or production), which gives the right to any worker to impose coordination (or production). As the team grows larger, it may be more efficient to allocate to one worker the decision rights to produce or coordinate, unless time-based controls are added to the preemptive coordination and preemptive production policies to either reserve some minimal amount of quiet time or to enforce coordination after some point. Finally, a fixed-interval meeting schedule works well for very large teams. Overall, our research indicates how to adapt team coordination scheduling rules to the degree of worker heterogeneity and team size.

Joint work with Charles Corbett.