Nudging Attention to Workplace Meeting Goals: A Large-Scale, Preregistered Field Experiment

Paper Title

Nudging Attention to Workplace Meeting Goals: A Large-Scale, Preregistered Field Experiment

Publication Info

• Topic area: Workplace meeting effectiveness and goal reflection interventions.
• Keywords: Meeting effectiveness, workplace reflection, goal clarity, collaboration tools, field experiment, nudging, Microsoft Teams, meeting intentionality, organisational behaviour, mixed-methods research.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Ineffective meetings are a persistent issue in workplaces, often due to a lack of clear goals and preparation. Existing collaboration tools do not adequately support goal reflection.
• Significance: Improving meeting effectiveness can enhance productivity, engagement, and collaboration in organisations, addressing a widespread source of dissatisfaction.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research highlights the value of workplace reflection and goal clarity for meeting effectiveness, but many studies lack ecological validity, rely on small samples, or use unfamiliar technologies. This study builds on these findings by testing a scalable, in-context intervention.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A lightweight, pre-meeting goal-reflection intervention delivered via pre-meeting surveys integrated into a workplace collaboration platform (Microsoft Teams).
• Novelty:
  1. Conducted a large-scale, preregistered field experiment with 361 employees and 7,196 meetings.
  2. Investigated the impact of pre-meeting reflection on meeting effectiveness and related behaviours.
  3. Explored the unintended impact of post-meeting surveys as a reflection intervention.
  4. Provided design implications for embedding goal reflection into workplace tools.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Participants were randomly assigned to treatment (pre- and post-meeting surveys) or control (post-meeting surveys only) groups.
  • Pre-meeting surveys prompted participants to select meeting goals and assess goal clarity.
  • Post-meeting surveys measured meeting effectiveness and engagement.
  • Mixed-methods analysis combined quantitative data (e.g., meeting ratings) and qualitative feedback (e.g., open-text responses).

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • No statistically significant improvement in meeting effectiveness from pre-meeting surveys (p = 0.36).
  • Both treatment and control groups showed pre-post improvements in self-reported goal clarity and communication.
  • Treatment participants were less interested in future reflection support than control participants.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Post-meeting surveys unintentionally functioned as a reflection intervention, leading to comparable changes in both groups.
  • Participants reported increased awareness and behaviour changes, such as clarifying goals and improving meeting preparation.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted over two weeks with 361 participants from a global technology company.
  • Primary outcome: self-reported meeting effectiveness.
  • Secondary outcomes: goal clarity, communication, and interest in future reflection support.
  • Mixed-methods analysis revealed mechanisms and barriers to reflection.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Measurement reactivity: Post-meeting surveys influenced control group behaviour, complicating causal inference.
  • Reliance on self-reported data limits objectivity.
  • Non-compliance with pre-meeting surveys reduced statistical power.
  • Future work should explore passive, automated measures of meeting effectiveness and refine intervention timing and targeting.

Summary

This study evaluated a pre-meeting goal-reflection intervention in a large-scale field experiment but found no significant improvement in meeting effectiveness. Both treatment and control groups showed comparable improvements in self-reported goal clarity and communication, suggesting that post-meeting surveys inadvertently served as a reflection intervention. The study highlights the potential of lightweight, workflow-integrated nudges to foster reflective habits and improve meeting intentionality. Future research should address challenges such as measurement reactivity, intervention compliance, and the design of context-sensitive, actionable reflection tools to support effective workplace meetings.