You’re not the only one who has meetings that start late Magnus Ragnvid/plainpicture

Once meetings are delayed by 10 minutes or more, they’re likely to be significantly less effective – and it’s probably your boss who’s to blame.

According to Joseph Allen, at the University of Nebraska Omaha, somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of all meetings start late. “People hate it, but we seem destined to experience it about half the time,” says Allen.

To investigate the effect this tardiness has on the meetings themselves, Allen and his colleagues put together a survey that asks questions about the last meeting someone attended. This survey was completed by 252 online volunteers who held jobs in a range of industries, including sales, retail, media, construction, IT and data entry.


Mind the managers

They found that 49 per cent of the meetings began on time, with 37 per cent starting 5 minutes late, and 14 per cent beginning 10 minutes late. Public sector jobs had the highest rate of late meetings, with 56 per cent failing to start on time, compared to 48 per cent in private companies.

After a late start time, respondents were less likely to report that they had found the meeting satisfactory. But lateness only seemed to impact the effectiveness of a meeting once the delay reached around 10 minutes. Allen thinks this is because we get more upset when a meeting is later than usual. “Rather than get angry every time someone is late, we get angry when someone is egregiously late,” he says.

Intriguingly, people who are managers reported fewer late meetings – nearly 57 per cent of managers said that their last meeting had started on time. This might be because managers are to blame, but don’t realise it. “As an ego-protection effort, they may either not recognise or dismiss their own lateness as ‘I am the leader, they can’t start without me – therefore I’m never late to my meetings’,” says Allen.

Journal reference: Journal of Organizational Behaviour, DOI: 10.1002/job.2276

Read more: Want to be the boss? How to signal your leadership potential