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Going in for one meeting: what being in the room actually buys you

Go in when the meeting has to produce something new, and dial in when it only has to pick between options that already exist. A 2022 Nature study found that groups working over video generated fewer creative ideas than groups in the same room, and found no such penalty when those groups chose which idea to pursue. This page is about one invitation and one trip: a meeting already on the calendar, and whether being in the room is worth the commute either side of it. Which meetings you could decline altogether belongs to the meetings pillar.

Which meetings are actually better in person?

One meeting at eleven, an hour of train either side of it, and neither your morning nor your afternoon survives it.

The question is not whether the office is a better place to work. It is what your hour produces. Brucks and Levav put that to the test in Nature in 2022, in a laboratory study and a field experiment run across five countries in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. Groups working over video generated fewer creative ideas than groups sitting in the same room. Then the half of the result nobody quotes: when those same groups had to select which idea to pursue, the video groups were no worse, and the authors report preliminary evidence that they were better at it.

Why it happens is the useful part. The authors went looking for the cause in the usual place, in how much information a channel carries and how quickly, and found it somewhere else. The screen itself. Drawing on eye-gaze data, recall measures and a semantic analysis of what people said, they argue that a video call pulls your attention onto a rectangle, and that a narrowed visual focus comes with a narrowed cognitive one. You produce fewer ideas because you are taking in less. Narrowing costs you nothing when the job is to compare three options that already exist, which is why the penalty lands on one half of the work and leaves the other alone.

A 2024 study arrives at the same split from a different direction. Macchi and De Pisapia took 40 employees of a large Italian electricity transmission company through the same kind of task three times over: face to face, on a 2D video call, and in virtual reality. Face to face came out best for generating ideas and for task absorption, which is how far into the work people got. Video came out least engaging on both. Each person did all three.

Both studies are narrower than the question you are asking. Brucks and Levav measured creative idea generation on a defined task rather than every kind of talking your meeting does, and Macchi worked with 40 people inside a single company. Neither one priced your commute. What they hand you is a split, and the split is worth having: an hour that has to make something new, against an hour that has to choose between things that already exist.

So read the invitation for which of the two you have been sent. Agenda items phrased as work still to be done, so a kick-off, scoping, working out how, or a problem that arrives with no proposed answer attached, describe an hour that has to generate. Items phrased as nouns, so the update, the status, the review, the sign-off, the three options to choose from, describe an hour that has to select. In practice the second kind is most of them. That is the honest reason most trips in for a single meeting do not pay, and it has nothing to do with how good the coffee is. Check yours before you book the train.

Can you ask to join remotely instead of travelling in?

Yes, and the thing to ask for is not the camera.

Most people treat dialling in as the degraded option, then try to make up the difference by switching video on. Tomprou and four colleagues tested roughly that assumption in PLOS ONE in 2021. They put 198 people to work in 99 pairs: 49 pairs could hear each other only, and 50 could also see each other. Every pair worked through a six-task battery built to measure collective intelligence, which is how well a group performs across a spread of different problems. Seeing each other made no difference at all to the score.

The pairs without video came out ahead on something else. They matched the pitch and rhythm of each other's speech more closely, they shared out the speaking turns more evenly, and it was that vocal matching, not the video, that predicted a higher score. Turn-taking was measurably less equal in the pairs who could see each other. Whatever a camera does for a remote meeting, holding the conversation together is not it, and the authors found no extra synchrony in facial expressions to make up the difference.

Read that one carefully. It stretches easily. Both conditions were remote, so the study cannot tell you your trip was pointless. Both are ways of not being there. The pairs were also strangers recruited from one university participation pool, working in a lab for about half an hour. A standing team of eight on a Thursday call has little in common with that.

The case you probably face is in none of this work. Everyone else is around one table, you are the single square on a screen at the end of it, and nobody has measured what that does to the meeting or to your share of it. In practice the room forgets the screen, and the repair is procedural rather than technical. Ask somebody in the room to own the job of bringing you in, and say in the first minute what you need out of the hour.

So make your ask specific. Good audio, a microphone in the middle of the room rather than a laptop at one end of the table, and your contribution written down beforehand so it survives being said once through a speaker. Writing your input out before a meeting earns its time wherever you are sitting. It does more for you on a call than it does in the room.

How do you decide whether one meeting justifies the commute?

Price the day, not the meeting.

A trip in for one hour is the most expensive version of going to the office, and it is the version people put on the scales. Ask what else that day buys: the two colleagues you would catch anyway, the thing you have been meaning to ask somebody face to face, the second meeting you could pull onto the same afternoon. Task batching is the method that fits here, applied to days rather than to tasks. One day in with four reasons to be there beats four days in with one reason each, and arranging that is usually within your gift.

Then ask whether the open-ended part of the meeting is real. Plenty of invitations promise a discussion and deliver a document read aloud. If a deck is attached, the thinking already happened somewhere else and you are travelling in to witness it. The test is whether anybody could arrive with a different answer and change what the meeting decides. If not, the hour selects, and it selects just as well through a speaker. None of the three studies tested an invitation, so that reading is this site's rather than a result.

People also defend the trip as the gentler option, and one finding cuts against that. The Italian study found the video setting the least tiring of the three, so travelling in does not buy you an easier hour. It buys a more productive hour, on one narrow kind of work. Decide it on what the meeting produces, because that is the part anyone has measured.

A swap beats declining. Ask for the meeting to land on a day you are already in, or ask to attend the generative half in person and take the rest remotely. Both read as commitment rather than avoidance, which is the whole difference between this and simply not turning up, and both are easier to agree to than a request to cancel.

If you do not go, cover the part the room would have given you. Send your input in writing before it starts so the discussion has it in front of them, and ask one person who was there to tell you afterwards what changed rather than what was said. Then spend your energy on being audible instead of visible.

How does your working style change the answer?

Which part of this you get wrong tends to follow how you already work. The four names below are this site's own, from the working-style self-check on the home page.

Architect-leaning readers turn the answer into a policy, which is most of the way to right and then one step past it. Two days in, fixed, every week, and the kick-off that actually needed the room lands on a Thursday you are at home. Keep the rule for ordinary weeks and let the generative meetings break it. Read the invitation, not the calendar.

Sprinters go in without doing the arithmetic, and the cost never shows up in the meeting. It shows up in the block of good work the train ate. If that is you, the question before you accept is what you are giving up to be there. You can almost always make it; that was never the constraint.

Visionary-leaning readers get the most out of exactly the hour the evidence says the room is for. An open problem, nothing decided yet. Somebody willing to argue. That is also the trap, because the meetings that feel worth attending are not the same set as the meetings worth travelling for, and a status call is dull in both settings. Spend the commute on the ones with no answer in the room yet.

Improvisers get their real value in the ten minutes after the meeting, standing at somebody's desk. No study on this page measured that, and it is still the most honest reason to go in: the corridor has no remote version. Worth saying out loud, though, because a trip justified by the corridor should be planned around the corridor, which means a day with people on it rather than an hour with a meeting on it.

So take the next invitation that would cost you a commute and read one line of it. Does this hour have to make something, or choose something? Then make the cheaper ask: move it to a day you are already in, and if that fails, travel for the meetings with nothing decided yet and dial into the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Is it worth going into the office just for one meeting?

Go in for a meeting that has to produce something new, and dial into one that only has to choose between options already on the table. A 2022 Nature study found groups over video generated fewer creative ideas than groups in the same room. Selecting between ideas that already existed showed no such penalty. In practice most invitations are the selecting kind, so most trips in for one do not pay.

Which meetings are actually better in person?

The ones whose output does not exist yet: kick-offs, scoping, and any hour spent working out how something will be done. Two studies point the same way, one across five countries and one inside a single Italian company. Both measured idea generation rather than discussion in general. An update, a review or a sign-off selects between things already written, and that half of the work shows no penalty on video.

Can you ask to join a meeting remotely instead of travelling in?

Yes, and ask for good audio and a microphone in the middle of the room rather than for everyone to turn their cameras on. In a 2021 study of 99 pairs, video made no difference to how well they solved problems together. The pairs on audio alone matched each other's speech and shared out the talking more evenly. Both conditions were remote, so this says which part of dialling in to protect, not that the trip was pointless.

How do you decide if a meeting justifies the commute?

Price the whole day against the trip, not the single meeting, then ask whether the open-ended part of the hour is real. One day in with four reasons to be there beats four days in with one reason each. If a deck is already attached to the invitation, the thinking happened somewhere else and you are going in to witness it.

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