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Meeting science is a relatively young research area, with the earliest studies that focused on the workplace meeting appearing less than 40 years ago (Schwartzman 1986). And yet so much of our time as employees, managers, and leaders has been and continues to be wrapped up in this activity. In fact, prior to 2020, Joe often referred to the exponential increase in workplace meetings as a “meeting epidemic.” That comparison is probably in poor taste given the experiences of so many in 2020, but the fact remains that we meet more now than ever before, with most workers seeing a 13% increase in their overall meeting load (Bloomberg 2020).

In this section, Joe drives the discussion as he reviews meeting science from before the COVID-19 pandemic and our suddenly virtual world. He provides checklists of counterproductive behaviors and best practices for effective meetings from the “old normal” (Chapter 3). He then reveals some of the discoveries in meeting science made since early 2020 – when everything changed – with another checklist and a reference guide for best practices for effective virtual meetings based upon the early research (Chapter 4). Video is an important part of those virtual meetings, but practices more specific to on-camera communication are discussed in Section 3.