Boredom in Meetings

For managers, meetings may be an arena “where the action is”: situations to display competence and moral character. However, others may feel less involved, and meetings may be experienced as nonsense, as meaningless and worthless. A recurring theme in various studies is complaints about meetings, particularly regarding their frequency, their emptiness, and the forced attendance, taking time from what the employees consider their core tasks. In this paper I discuss such experiences: in interviews by retold experiences or stories, in field observations by noticing small talk, by photographs of side-involvement such as meeting scribbles or observing the use of smart phones or laptops during meetings, and other practices of “aways”.