Nudging Attention to Workplace Meeting Goals: A Large-Scale, Preregistered Field Experiment

Authors: Lev Tankelevitch, Ava Elizabeth Scott, Nagaravind Challakere, Payod Panda, Sean Rintel
Venue: CHI 2026
Free from the publisher

AThe study

Preregistered randomised field experiment with 361 employees of a global technology company over two weeks. A Microsoft Teams bot targeted 7196 of their meetings with short surveys.

Before each meetingAfter each meetingEnd of two weeks Goal prompt group163 people Goal reflection survey, 5 minutes before Effectiveness rating End of two weeks: debriefing surveyGoal clarity questions repeated from onboarding Comparison group198 people No survey Effectiveness rating

BThe intervention

  1. Find eligible meetingsThe bot reads the person's calendar and picks accepted video meetings.under 3 hoursat least two attendees10 minutes free beforehand
  2. Name what success looks likeFive minutes before the start, a chat message asks what success would look like for the meeting.Decision is madeEveryone is up to datewrite your own
  3. Rate the goal and the outlookThe person rates how clearly the goal was communicated and how effective the meeting is expected to be.
  4. Rate the meetingTwo minutes after the scheduled end, a short survey asks how effective the meeting was, on a six-point scale.

Steps 2 and 3 are the goal prompt. The comparison group received only step 4.

CWhat changed

Over the two weeksboth groups rated their meetings, and only the goal prompt group answered goal surveys beforehand

  • Both groups: meeting goals felt clearer by the end of the two weeks.Self-reported at onboarding and debriefing. Goal clarity and communication rose reliably in both groups, p < 0.05.
  • Both groups: most people described new awareness or habits around meeting goals.57% of the goal prompt group and 60% of the comparison group, in open text. Examples include adding goals to invitations and declining or reshaping meetings.
  • Both groups: rating meetings may itself have prompted reflection on goals.The authors' interpretation, since the ratings were meant only as measurement.

What the goal prompt addedthe goal prompt group compared with the comparison group

  • –Goal prompt group: meetings were rated about as effective as the comparison group's.Self-reported after each meeting. No reliable difference, p = 0.36, even counting only meetings where the goal survey was done.
  • –Goal prompt group: 57% said taking part made meetings more effective, against 52%.Self-reported at debriefing. Not a reliable difference, p = 0.13.
  • Goal prompt group: many said the prompt came too late to act on.Many also reported survey fatigue from prompts before every meeting. Across all participants, lack of time before meetings was the most common barrier to thinking about goals.
  • ↓Goal prompt group: less interested in future pre-meeting goal prompts.Self-reported, p = 0.01. Over two-thirds of all participants were still quite, very or extremely interested in such prompts.

↑ better than the comparison group   ↓ worse than the comparison group   – no reliable difference

DKey takeaway

Regular, light reflection can support meeting intentionality by making meeting goals clearer. Goal prompts may help most when timely and optional, since prompts before every meeting can tire people.

Made for this site with AI assistance from the verified research brief. It is not the paper's own figure.

Abstract

Ineffective meetings are pervasive. Thinking ahead explicitly about meeting goals may improve effectiveness, but current collaboration platforms lack integrated support. We tested a lightweight goal-reflection intervention in a preregistered field experiment in a global technology company (361 employees, 7196 meetings). Over two weeks, workers in the treatment group completed brief pre-meeting surveys in their collaboration platform, nudging attention to goals for upcoming meetings. To measure impact, both treatment and control groups completed post-meeting surveys about meeting effectiveness. While the intervention impact on meeting effectiveness was not statistically significant, mixed-methods findings revealed improvements in self-reported awareness and behaviour across both groups, with post-meeting surveys unintentionally functioning as an intervention. We highlight the promise of supporting goal reflection, while noting challenges of evaluating and supporting workplace reflection for meetings, including workflow and collaboration norms, and attitudes and behaviours around meeting preparation. We conclude with implications for designing technological support for meeting intentionality

Research brief

By Lev Tankelevitch, Ava Elizabeth Scott, Nagaravind Challakere, Payod Panda, and Sean Rintel.

Takeaway: Brief goal-reflection surveys can build meeting intentionality whether they come before and after meetings or only after. Either way, people reported clearer, better-communicated goals, and most felt their meetings improved, perhaps because repeated reflection acted as micro-training. Adding pre-meeting prompts brought no further measurable gain in rated effectiveness.

Why this matters

What was known
Meetings are widely seen as purposeless, and reflection tools look promising, but most evidence comes from small studies outside normal work. much of the research is conducted with limited ecological validity, relying on out-of-context reflection, unfamiliar interfaces, or small samples (§1, p. 1)
What this paper adds
A large, preregistered field experiment with a control group, run inside people's everyday collaboration tool, plus mixed-methods evidence on how people experienced it. There is also a lack of research measuring the impacts of prospective reflection, at a large scale, compared against a control condition. (§3, p. 3)
Who it matters to
People building calendars, collaboration platforms and AI meeting assistants, and researchers who evaluate reflection and nudging at work.

Research questions

Method and data

Design
Preregistered (AsPredicted #194719) two-week randomised field experiment. Treatment: pre-meeting goal-reflection surveys plus post-meeting effectiveness surveys. Control: post-meeting surveys only.
Prototype
The Meeting Survey app, a Microsoft Teams bot connected to each participant's calendar. For eligible video meetings (under 3 hours, at least two attendees, accepted, and with at least 10 minutes free beforehand) it sent a chat message 5 minutes before the start asking what success would look like for the meeting. People ticked goals phrased as success criteria, such as 'Decision is made' or 'Everyone is up to date', or wrote their own. They also rated how clearly the goal had been communicated and how effective they expected the meeting to be. Two minutes after the scheduled end it sent a short survey asking how effective the meeting had been, on a six-point scale. It was built with the Bot Framework and the Microsoft Graph calendar interface. The control group received only the post-meeting survey.
Two survey forms. Pre-meeting: what success looks like, chosen from 11 goals such as decision is made, and ratings of goal clarity and expected effectiveness. Post-meeting: rated effectiveness and whether there was an agenda.
Figure 1: Pre- and post- meeting surveys as they appeared in chat threads via our Meeting Survey application. In the pre-meeting survey, treatment group participants could select multiple goals from 11 options, as well as write in their own goals. From the paper, Figure 1, p. 5.
Setting
A global technology company, inside participants' everyday collaboration platform (Microsoft Teams).
Participants / data
361 employees (treatment = 163, control = 198) and 7196 meetings.
Duration
Two weeks (10 working days), with onboarding and debriefing surveys.
Analysis
Intention-to-treat mixed-effects linear regression on per-meeting effectiveness ratings with multiple imputation. Difference-in-differences models for goal clarity and communication. Exploratory CACE analysis. GPT-4o-assisted labelling (manually reviewed) and reflexive thematic analysis of open-text responses.

Findings

Questions this paper answers

Do prompts to think about goals before a meeting make it more effective?
Not measurably, in a large workplace field experiment. A short goal survey five minutes before each meeting did not raise how effective people rated their meetings. It possibly came too late to act on, and effectiveness depends on all attendees, not only the one who reflected. (See §5.2.1, p. 8.)
Does reflecting on meeting goals change how people work?
It seems to build meeting intentionality, though we cannot prove it. Being asked regularly to think about meeting goals, even after the fact, coincided with people reporting clearer goals, putting them in invitations and questioning meetings. Without a comparison group that got no surveys, other influences cannot be ruled out. (See §6.2.1, p. 13; §6.2.2, p. 13; §6.2.3, p. 14.)
Why don't people think about meeting goals in advance?
Lack of time before meetings was the most common barrier for both organisers and attendees. Attendees also often felt unable to change meetings, or that goals were not their responsibility, while organisers assumed attendees would not read them. (See §6.1.2, p. 11; §6.1.5, p. 12.)
Can measuring a behaviour change it?
It may. When 361 tech company employees were randomly assigned pre-meeting goal prompts for two weeks, post-meeting effectiveness ratings were meant only as measurement. Yet they seem to have prompted goal reflection even without prompts, making the prompts' effect harder to detect. Reflection research is especially prone to this. (See §6.2.1, p. 13; §6.2.2, p. 13.)

Quantitative results

MeasureResultWhere
Sample361 participants (treatment = 163, control = 198); 7196 meetings§4.2, p. 4
Treatment effect on per-meeting effectiveness (intention to treat)p = 0.36 (not significant)§5.2.1, p. 8
Treatment effect for compliant meetings (CACE, exploratory)p = 0.6 (not significant)§5.2.1, p. 8
Said study participation increased meeting effectiveness57% treatment vs 52% control; p = 0.13 (not significant)§5.2.2, p. 8
Said study participation increased engagement43% treatment vs 34% control; p = 0.05 (not significant)§5.2.2, p. 8
Goal clarity and communication: time effect (both groups)all p-values < 0.05; treatment × time all p-values > 0.1§5.2.3, p. 8
Reported awareness or behaviour change (open text)57% treatment, 60% control; χ2 = 1.97, p = 0.37 between groups§6, p. 10
Interest in a future pre-meeting prompt to think about meeting goals: overall, and treatment vs controlOver two-thirds 'quite', 'very' or 'extremely' interested, but treatment less interested than control, p = 0.01§5.2.4, p. 9
Post-meeting surveys completed more than 15 minutes after the meeting55% control, 60% treatment§5.1, p. 7
Answering as organisers, saw 'attendees will not read or understand the goal' as a barrier to considering goals27%§6.1.5, p. 12

Contributions and implications

Limitations

›

Concepts

Meeting intentionality
Thinking ahead explicitly about meeting goals. It depends on organisers, attendees and other collaborators working together. Meeting intentionality is inherently interdependent, requiring coordinated effort between meeting organisers, attendees, and other collaborators. (§7.2.4, p. 17)
Nudge plus
A nudge that adds a moment of reflection rather than relying only on fast, habitual responses. The more recent 'nudge plus' involves incorporating aspects of reflection, i.e., System 2 thinking, into nudges (§2.2, p. 2)
Workplace reflection
Reflection shaped by organisational context. where competing priorities, time pressure, and social dynamics shape when and how reflection occurs (§2.2, p. 2)
Measurement reactivity
When measuring a behaviour changes it. Here, the post-meeting effectiveness surveys may have acted as a reflection prompt for the control group too. What was intended for measurement thus potentially became an active reflection prompt (§7.1.2, p. 15)

Figures

Two survey forms. Pre-meeting: what success looks like, chosen from 11 goals such as decision is made, and ratings of goal clarity and expected effectiveness. Post-meeting: rated effectiveness and whether there was an agenda.
Figure 1: Pre- and post- meeting surveys as they appeared in chat threads via our Meeting Survey application. In the pre-meeting survey, treatment group participants could select multiple goals from 11 options, as well as write in their own goals. From the paper, Figure 1, p. 5.
Coefficient plot: the treatment coefficient's confidence interval crosses zero (p = 0.36). Recurring meetings rate lower and meetings the participant organised rate higher. Right: control and treatment average ratings both near 'quite effective'.
Figure 5: Analysis results for the meeting effectiveness ratings. Left panel displays regression coefficients (black markers) for the condition assignment ('TREATMENT') and the covariates, along with error bars indicating 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Positive coefficients indicate a positive association with meeting effectiveness ratings, and vice versa. The numerical values to the right show the coefficients, along with 95% CIs and p-values. Statistical significance indicators: ** p<0.001, ** p<0.01, * p<0.05, + p<0.1. The right panel visualises participants' average meeting ratings (coloured markers) for each condition, as estimated marginal means derived from a linear mixed model on the complete-case data (for visualisation only). To the right are density distributions of the participant data. Black markers indicate group averages and 95% CIs. From the paper, Figure 5, p. 9.
Stacked bars comparing onboarding and debriefing answers for goal clarity and goal communication, as organiser and as attendee. In both treatment and control groups, the 'most' and 'always' categories grow at debriefing, more for organisers.
Figure 7: Frequency of meeting goal clarity and communication from the perspective of an organiser and attendee, measured in the onboarding and debriefing surveys, for treatment and control groups. Raw data visualised as proportions of responses in each category. From the paper, Figure 7, p. 10.
Two bar charts of barriers to considering meeting goals. For organisers and attendees alike, lack of time before meetings is the top barrier, followed by prioritising other activities. 27% of organisers say attendees will not read the goal.
Figure 10: Perceived barriers to considering meeting goals before a meeting, for all participants. Participants were asked to answer the same set of questions from the perspective of meeting organisers and attendees. Percentages do not add up to 100% because participants could select multiple options. From the paper, Figure 10, p. 13.

How to cite

Lev Tankelevitch, Ava Elizabeth Scott, Nagaravind Challakere, Payod Panda, and Sean Rintel. 2026. Nudging Attention to Workplace Meeting Goals: A Large-Scale, Preregistered Field Experiment. CHI 2026. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791199

This brief was prepared with AI assistance and published by Sean Rintel. It is not the authors' published text. Page numbers refer to this PDF.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{tankelevitch2026nudging,
author = {Tankelevitch, Lev and Scott, Ava Elizabeth and Challakere, Nagaravind and Panda, Payod and Rintel, Sean},
title = {Nudging Attention to Workplace Meeting Goals: A Large-Scale, Preregistered Field Experiment},
booktitle = {CHI 2026},
year = {2026},
month = {April},
publisher = {ACM},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791199},
doi = {10.1145/3772318.3791199},
}