Radically Honest Meetings
Meetings drive … productive people especially crazy … [but] serve valuable if hidden functions. For example, meetings publicize information about status. Who speaks? Who finds it necessary to praise whom? Who displays a confident demeanor? Meetings help managers and employees figure out how to build necessary coalitions. …
Meetings also confer a sense of control. Attendees feel like insiders who have a real voice in decisions. This boosts their motivation to implement ideas discussed as a group. For this reason it is especially important to listen to the blowhards and the obstructionists, who otherwise would pursue their own agendas rather than support a common plan. Frequent meetings help a business apply bonuses and yearly evaluations with greater precision. … meetings reaffirm the value of the individual to the company. …
That is Tyler Cowen at his best. Now when people talk about why we have meetings, or what function meetings served, we don’t usually talk about showing and judging status and buying off blowhards. Could we talk more honestly about the function of meetings, or would that defeat the purpose?
To be fair to hierarchy, it really is sometimes very valuable for a company's efficacy for the hierarchy to be well established, clear, and seem natural, e.g. to ground it in the social, not just the formal.
I've never worked in a place where department meetings were used correctly. They are used to convey information from management, but that could be done much more efficiently by sending out an email. These meetings are very much of the status-defining ilk.
On the other hand, small project-based meetings are often productive and useful from a planning, idea-sharing and motivating point of view. These meetings also reinforce the power hierarchy, but they are at least worth the time and cost of the employees (not to mention the demoralization of people who have to spend time wasted in meetings).