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

2026-02-18

AI Summary

This study addresses the inefficiency of workplace meetings stemming from ambiguous objectives and the lack of explicit support for meeting intentionality in existing collaboration tools. Conducted as a pre-registered field experiment within a large technology company, the research embedded brief pre-meeting prompts encouraging goal reflection into an enterprise collaboration platform, paired with post-meeting effectiveness assessments. This approach enabled the first large-scale evaluation of a lightweight goal-intervention in authentic work settings. Although the intervention did not significantly improve perceived meeting effectiveness, it enhanced participants’ self-awareness of meeting goals and prompted behavioral adjustments. Notably, the post-meeting survey itself appeared to exert an intervention effect, challenging conventional assessment paradigms. The findings offer empirical grounding and methodological insights for future systems designed to support intentional meeting practices.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Ineffective meetings are pervasive. Thinking ahead explicitly about meeting goals may improve effectiveness, but current collaboration platforms lack integrated support. We tested a lightweight goal-reflection intervention in a preregistered field experiment in a global technology company (361 employees, 7196 meetings). Over two weeks, workers in the treatment group completed brief pre-meeting surveys in their collaboration platform, nudging attention to goals for upcoming meetings. To measure impact, both treatment and control groups completed post-meeting surveys about meeting effectiveness. While the intervention impact on meeting effectiveness was not statistically significant, mixed-methods findings revealed improvements in self-reported awareness and behaviour across both groups, with post-meeting surveys unintentionally functioning as an intervention. We highlight the promise of supporting goal reflection, while noting challenges of evaluating and supporting workplace reflection for meetings, including workflow and collaboration norms, and attitudes and behaviours around meeting preparation. We conclude with implications for designing technological support for meeting intentionality.

Problem

• meeting effectiveness
• goal reflection
• workplace collaboration
• collaboration platforms
• meeting preparation

Innovation

• goal reflection
• meeting effectiveness
• nudge intervention
• collaboration platform
• field experiment