Meeting Cadences in Organizations: A Multilevel Conceptualization

Employees often spend hours of their workday in meetings, with virtual and hybrid formats streamlining the scheduling of meetings, while simultaneously increasing meeting load. While prior research has focused on meeting quality (e.g., agendas, facilitation, engagement), much less attention has been given to meeting scheduling cadence, defined as the pattern, frequency, and spacing of a set of related meetings over time. This conceptual paper positions meeting cadence as a distinct organizational construct and argues it is central to how individuals, dyads, teams, and organizations coordinate work. We propose a set of theoretical approaches for studying meeting cadence at multiple levels of analysis, highlighting its multilevel nature and outlining directions for future research on this theoretically grounded and practically meaningful phenomenon. This work advances understanding of the temporal structuring of meetings and calls for empirical research to inform evidence-based meeting scheduling practices in organizations.