Investigating Meeting Organisation as a Coordinative Work Process Using Narrative Networks

Abstract

Meetings are a fundamental part of knowledge work and employees spend significant amounts of time organising meetings. While certain types of meetings, such as standing committees, are well organised, the processes for organising regular workgroup meetings are often poorly organised. Resulting in complaints about unnecessary and inefficient meetings and a lack of effective use of collaboration software to support the meeting organisation. In this paper, we aim to gain a richer understanding of how meetings that are supported by collaboration software are prepared, conducted, and post-processed. By using the Narrative Networks approach, we describe, visualise, and analyse the sequences of actions involved in organising regular meetings within a distributed workgroup. Although the meeting organisation process is not prescribed, formalised or instantiated and the collaboration software used is process non-aware, we nevertheless identified recurring patterns for organising regular workgroup meetings. Using (digital) trace data collected from collaboration tools and enriched with participant observations, 48 meeting performances were captured and analysed. Our analysis reveals that the process, while effective and efficient, is constantly changing and each performance is unique. The study contributes to the understanding of less well-structured digitally supported processes.