Why do we meet anyway? A chance to relieve the burden of meetings.

The signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 was an important paper-laden face-to-face meeting around the table. Not a run of the mill meeting by any means. Fast forward 100 years and what can be said about the business of holding and attending meetings? Given the global shock of COVID-19, the norms of meetings are currently not as they once were and may be changed forever.

I was approached by a journalist last week who had dug up a paper of mine that was published in 2013 called “Business Travel – The social practices surrounding meetings”. I’d been curious then about what was understood about meetings as a generator of business travel. Not much it seemed. It now seems that we should be much more than just curious about the matter.

In this article I have gone back to the 2013 paper (which you can download if you wish) and tried to draw out some food for thought that now deserves further attention.

Meetings matter to the case for investing in transport

Meetings (of various sorts, including conferences) have given rise to a significant amount of travel – business travel that in economic appraisal is valued highly and which has contributed considerably to the case for investment in transport infrastructure. What is to become of meetings in future or what should become of them in future? The answers matter greatly to the transport system and transport providers. In 2003 Peter Mackie noted that “[f]or proposed road schemes …although business travel by car only accounts for around one sixth of all traffic, it accounts for about half of the assumed ‘costs’ of travel time”. It must be said that not all business travel is by knowledge workers for the purposes of meeting for information exchange. Yet, we have limited empirical knowledge about business travel. In our cherished and long running National Travel Survey (NTS) in England, there is little to be gleaned about the makeup of business travel: the NTS has a set of predefined journey purposes and ‘in the course of work’ is still (as far as I am aware) the blanket response category for all business travel (whether as a heating engineer doing the rounds or a ‘briefcase traveller’ on the way to a boardroom discussion).

Does being co-present matter?

In media richness theory it is suggested that communicating more complex information requires higher ‘bandwidth’ media (notably face to face) and straightforward information requires only a low-density medium (e.g. email). So in purely functional terms, there are sometimes grounds for the people involved in a meeting travelling to be co-present rather than the information itself doing the travelling. Yet is seems likely that over recent years the ‘bandwidth’ of digital communication has improved significantly, suggesting that it is encroaching more and more upon the functional need for face-to-face meetings. However, meeting face-to-face may involve more than fulfilment of functional need. It can, for example, be an investment in social capital. Juliet Jain (a UWE colleague of mine) and I wrote a paper called 'The gift of travel time’. This included the notion that travelling to a meeting can be an important symbolic gesture to the person or people being met that they are ‘worth’ the investment of travel time involved. Are we able to think creatively about how such social capital can be nurtured if such meetings are no longer face-to-face?

Travel time versus meeting time

Eighteen years ago my colleagues Tim Schwanen and Martin Dijst defined something called the Travel Time Ratio (TTR): “the ratio between travel time and the sum of travel time and activity duration” (with a value ranging from 0 to 1). If my round-trip travel time for a meeting is 2 hours and the meeting lasts 6 hours then the TTR is 0.25. If, on the other hand, my round trip is 6 hours and the meeting lasts 2 hours then the TTR is 0.75. Its just as well that I may be able to use some of my travel time to work because the opportunity cost of that latter meeting would be significant in terms of the sunk investment in travel time. A virtual meeting would allow me to achieve a TTR of zero – no early start with a drive to the airport; no late arrival home with the accompanying weariness. On the other hand, if a face-to-face meeting is called for, I could cluster meetings in one geographic location such that I could secure more meeting time to offset the travel time and thus push that TTR down. To what extent is TTR considered by those organising and attending meetings? I would suggest it now needs more consideration, much more probably.

Why do we go to meetings?

This is surely a critical question. Since meetings are a source of derision in terms of time wasting (and given the productivity puzzle at least in the UK) it does beg the question as to whether we really understand why people go to meetings and conferences (even some virtual ones!)? There is little if any empirical research on this, especially in relation to the travel implications. However, I’d suggest there are a number of reasons for wanting (or feeling obliged) to attend a meeting requiring travel, or for wanting to avoid one:

• Business norm – its just part of the ritual of work and others’ expectations of you
• Time away from ‘the office’ – the opportunity cost of not being in the office or the opportunity benefit of getting away from the office and its surrounding distractions and demands on time
• Time away from home – that may for some be a welcome change of scene or for others a hardship or something difficult to arrange
• Information sharing – a functional purpose
• Influencing decisions – personal involvement in, and an ability to affect, the dynamics of exchange taking place
• Status and recognition – being seen to be at the meeting for oneself and/or for one’s employer
• Networking – maintaining and strengthening existing social ties as well as making new ones
• Sociability – the opportunity for overspills from the ‘business’ of the meeting into wider encounters with other people
• Experiencing new places – broadening one’s horizons
• Monetary cost – the need for someone to pay for people having face-to-face encounter

Have a think back to some of the meetings you attended pre-COVID that involved (perhaps international) travel. How conscious were you of the set of reasons for attending and their relative importance? How much thought did you give to weighing up the overall merits of agreeing to participate in the meeting? How often did you reflect afterwards on whether the meeting (and travel) was worth it and use that reflection to inform future decisions? How many of the aspects above could be met in different ways other than through travelling to be at the meeting? Surely it’s the outcomes (personal and professional) that should matter more than the means? Maybe travelling to meetings wasn’t the best answer and shouldn’t be in future.

Old habits die hard

In the study of travel behaviour we have come to understand that while our transport models may often treat the world as being made up of people acting like Mr Spock (rational actors who are seeking to maximise the utility of their choices based upon full knowledge of the alternatives available), the world in practice is (also) made up of people acting like Homer Simpson (looking to make ‘good enough’ decisions about their travel because they have other things on their minds (Duff beer, donuts and sleep perhaps)). We now appreciate that people operate in routines and habits such that some travel choices are automatic – the response to ‘how to go to work this morning?’ is ‘catch the number 57 bus (as I usually do)'; its not ‘hmm, let me weigh up what’s my best option today…’. Perhaps the same is true of meetings. Those organising them and those attending tend more towards Homer Simpson than towards Mr Spock. They don’t ask as much as perhaps they should: ‘do we need this meeting?’; ‘should we review where the meeting takes place or who should attend?’; or ‘do we need the meeting this often/at all and if so can it not be done virtually?’. As the saying goes, “the least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favour of holding meetings” (Thomas Sowell). COVID-19 should surely have provided a shock to our unquestioning pursuit of habits and compliance with norms when it comes to whether and how we use our time for meetings – especially those involving travel.

Who’s calling the shots?

There are power-relations at work in organising and undertaking meetings. Not everyone has a say (or feels they are entitled to) in terms of whether, when, where and how a meeting takes place in terms of its efficiency and effectiveness. Likewise, not everyone has a say (or feels they are entitled to) in terms of whether or not they should, or need to, take part in the meeting (in person or remotely). Therefore responsibility falls upon organisations and those responsible for overseeing and shaping organisational culture to rethink the nature of meetings and their role in helping achieve organisational objectives. As we transition to the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic in due course, organisations will be looking more keenly than ever at efficiency and effectiveness – in some cases for their very survival. To sleepwalk unquestioningly back into questionable practices of meetings involving travel would be incredibly short-sighted.

The meeting is dead – long live the meeting

Meetings were evolving before COVID-19 struck. In my 2+ years in my role with Mott MacDonald I have probably never travelled as much and yet I have also never been involved before in so many (multi-way) audio and video calls. It has long been recognised that some virtual meetings are direct substitutes for face-to-face meetings involving travel, while other virtual meetings may act to stimulate additional face-to-face meetings as business networks are broadened and activities increase. The relationships between transport and telecommunications are multiple and interwoven. Nevertheless, demand management by organisations and individuals is called for in determining how much activity and travel time is devoted to meetings in relation to the outcomes achieved. In turn, the ‘mode split’ between physical and virtual meetings needs to shift further towards virtual in my view – and can do so without undue adverse effects, I would suggest. In my 2013 paper I noted that “teleconferencing mechanisms may in time secure greater overlaps of capability with face to face meetings. As well as advances in capability and usability, this may arise in part due to what is known as channel expansion theory — the effectiveness of the medium expanding as users learn how to use it better and as communication through the medium becomes more intuitive”. This seems now to be especially important. COVID-19 has effectively enacted a widespread training and development programme for meetings – people are learning how to use new software platforms to organise and participate in virtual meetings. Most online meetings involve participants self-teaching and helping each other with tips on how to use various features of the new meetings’ environment. Things which were at first uncomfortable and perhaps counterintuitive are becoming more straightforward and normalised – people are adjusting and acclimatising. This would likely have happened, albeit more slowly, without a global pandemic. Yet in the circumstances we are in, there is a golden opportunity to recalibrate ‘meetingness’ and allow new, less travel intensive, norms to become embedded in business practices.

Excess business travel

To close my 2013 paper (taking a lead from Susan Handy and Pat Mokhtarian (colleagues in the United States) who had coined the term ‘excess driving’), I put forward the term ‘excess briefcase travel’. I defined it as follows: “travel derived from engagement in business encounters involving co-presence where physical presence could have been reasonably substituted for by other means of engagement in the encounter or no encounter needing to take place”. I noted then the challenge of interpreting what ‘reasonably’ meant. However, my suggestion in 2013 was that perhaps 20% of briefcase travel could be removed. To me this now seems eminently achievable.

By way of closing I would say the following. Given that transport planners place so much stock in travel’s status as a derived demand, I find it remarkable that so little effort to date has gone into understanding the nature and scale of the determinants that underly business travel. Meetings have a lot to answer for and we need to learn quickly now about how we can reconfigure the practices of meetings. Doing so can deliver organisational and individual benefits alongside being able to achieve an appreciable reduction in the amount of motorised travel that has hitherto sustained the old ways of meetings.