Biomedical Engineering Editorial Argues Faculty Meetings Waste Time and Could Drive Talent Away, Offers Framework for Change

Faculty meetings are supposed to be the beating heart of an academic department, a place where colleagues gather to make decisions, celebrate achievements, and work toward shared goals of excellence in education and research. Yet a group of biomedical engineering faculty members argues that faculty meetings are often poorly organized, have inequitable distribution of voices, and that meetings that waste time can ultimately drive people away from the department. In an editorial published in Annals of Biomedical Engineering, ten authors from different career stages and institutions, writing as part of the BME UNITE community, lay out a practical framework for turning faculty meetings into spaces for effective and democratic decision making. Their central claim is that meetings that waste time lead to disengagement and poor attendance and can ultimately drive people away from the department.

The authors ground their argument in an internal survey of 29 faculty members belonging to BME UNITE, a self-selected, multi-institutional group particularly attuned to inclusion issues. Respondents came from a broad range of department sizes, and their answers were largely consistent with the authors’ own experience. More than half of those surveyed said their departments’ faculty meetings are often repetitive and lack clearly stated goals. Respondents also complained that topics covered were misaligned with decision-making priorities. The authors are careful to note that these percentages illustrate the experiences of the BME UNITE members who responded and are not intended to be generalizable results. The authors note that complaints from their surveyed faculty overlap with issues discussed in the business literature, including that topics are often repetitive, that discussions are often dominated by a subset of individuals, and that many individuals are disengaged.

Faculty members spend over 17 percent of their time in meetings and administrative responsibilities, so the need for departmental meetings to be valued and efficient is paramount, the authors write. They cite a study of 440 individuals across diverse organizations showing that ineffective meetings lead to increased employee disengagement, and that the emotional exhaustion driving this response also leads to decreased productivity. They argue that multiplying that loss of productivity by the number of meeting attendees makes the department-level cost of lost work after faculty meetings staggeringly high. By contrast, participants attending meetings with improved structure experienced statistically significant improvements in engagement and decreased emotional exhaustion. The work of Steven Rogelberg, an organizational science professor at UNC-Charlotte who studies meetings scientifically, reinforces the point: participants in good meetings can create solutions no individual could have alone, meetings do not need to fill their entire allocated time, and facilitators should avoid talking too much.

The authors highlight how little training anyone receives in running meetings. Less than 25 percent of business managers receive training on how to hold a meeting, according to the editorial. In the authors’ anecdotal experience, essentially no faculty receive such training. Consequently, they write, it is no wonder that faculty meetings are often poorly executed. The problem is compounded in academia, where the authors found scant articles with meeting strategies appropriate for faculty meetings and academic settings, and only one on how to foster equity and inclusion when designing meetings. They also draw on an essay by Lundquist and Misra on faculty members' abhorrence for meetings in higher education, which made two key suggestions: facilitators that can mediate the discussion without speaking over others, and, ironically, deciding whether the meeting is even necessary.

The first pillar of the authors’ framework is the agenda. They recommend creating dynamic, inclusive agendas that everyone can contribute to and that are distributed well in advance. A good agenda helps department members prepare thoughtfully, understand the goals of the meeting, and keep conversations focused, productive, and on time. The authors suggest a general consensus that 45 to 60 minutes is a typical length for faculty meetings, and they stress that it is critical not to overpack the agenda so meetings end on time or early. The call for agenda items should go out weeks in advance, with the final agenda sent three to seven days ahead, each item showing the topic, the allotted time, and the discussion leader. Topics should ideally be led by individuals with key expertise who are passionate about the subject, often committee chairs, though the authors encourage creativity in assigning emerging issues to broaden the diversity of voices leading discussions.

Dynamic agendas can also include items not typically covered at faculty meetings. The authors suggest letting faculty members give short updates on their research programs, bringing in guest speakers such as research center leaders, campus leaders, and librarians, and even inviting students to attend the start or end of a meeting to bring topics forward, an idea that could extend to staff, alumni, and other department stakeholders. They also recommend taking time to celebrate wins, such as grants awarded, papers published, and students graduated, because celebrating builds joy and allows attendees to feel seen and know their contributions are valued. Borrowing from research on flipped classrooms in K-12 education, they propose alternative formats: flipped meetings with pre-reading done in advance and problem solving during meeting time, rotating stations for rapid feedback via post-its or whiteboards, and participant-driven agenda setting with small-group breakouts. Items that arise organically but do not belong on the agenda can be moved to a Parking Lot for follow-up at a future meeting, a process the authors stress must clearly communicate that the issue has been acknowledged as important and deferred, not dismissed.

The second pillar is logistics. For meetings to be fully democratic and inclusive, they need to be held at days and times when all faculty members can, and are expected, to attend; a best practice is a regular day and time with no departmental courses offered, set aside for faculty meetings. Seating matters more than it might seem. Departments can outgrow their meeting rooms, leaving a small table with interior seating and others around the outside, so some faculty may literally not have a seat at the table. Senior members often have figuratively assigned seats while newcomers are left with whatever remains, and these arrangements can create physical separation that directly impacts the tenor of discussion and who is seen and heard. On virtual and hybrid formats, which the COVID-19 pandemic forced many departments to adopt, the authors note that virtual and hybrid options are the most inclusive option, allowing members to connect while traveling and letting those with pre-existing conditions or disabilities avoid travel, but fully virtual meetings can leave members disengaged and multitasking, and hybrid meetings often lead to disjointed meetings with different discussions occurring simultaneously among in-person versus virtual participants. The best choice, they conclude from conversations with many colleagues, depends on each department’s existing structure and climate, and should be discussed openly. They suggest ground rules such as cameras on for virtual attendees, assigning housekeeping tasks to maintain engagement, designating someone to monitor the chat, and investing in technology that ensures everyone in the physical room can be seen and heard by those online and vice versa.

The third pillar is facilitation and governance. The authors argue that leadership training should be required in academia, given that nearly all of them will be in some type of leadership position, and they recommend starting with Rogelberg's book The Surprising Science of Meetings. Good meeting leaders keep the discussion moving, stick to allotted times, and make hard decisions about which agenda items deserve faculty time. They issue a pointed caution: topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice should not be solely led by faculty from minoritized groups. Departments should establish ground rules, possibly drawing on Robert’s Rules of Order for voting procedures, and make operating rules accessible to all new members. Strong bylaws codifying voting rights, quorum definitions, meeting frequency, and amendment procedures foster transparency and positive culture, and the authors emphasize that strong onboarding documentation is particularly important for incoming faculty from minoritized groups. When outspoken faculty dominate discussions or present opinions as facts, the authors recommend active bystander intervention: amplify the suggestions made by silenced colleagues, acknowledging the source. In well-run departments, there is a cultural expectation that every faculty member’s voice will be heard.

The final pillar is culture, which the authors argue begins well before anyone convenes in a room. If a department does not have good values, it cannot expect to have a values-driven meeting, they write. They recommend starting meetings with a Safety Minute or Diversity and Inclusion Minute, consistently included on the agenda and never skipped for time. Efficient meetings also require work outside of them, often through strong committee work, since a chair cannot spread people too thin or keep relying on the same efficient faculty members for service. Committees reporting clear outcomes make meetings more efficient and clarify who leads agenda items and takes action afterward. The authors also suggest moving pure announcements to email or newsletters, noting that if faculty meetings are used only as a series of announcements, a mass email would save faculty time, though they acknowledge that if electronic dissemination is failing, FYI updates at meetings may be required but should be kept to minimum, non-discussion points. For departments with toxic cultures, they recommend ten simple rules for conflict resolution from Lewitter, Bourne, and Attwood, and ground rules from the Civic Laboratory group emphasizing empathy, one speaker at a time, and affirming rather than disparaging ideas.

The authors close by suggesting that readers test out one or more of the suggested strategies at their faculty meetings to find out what works for their department. They suggest testing simple adjustments to seating arrangements or agendas, changing meeting times or venues, and practicing allyship, then using exit forms after a few meetings to find out directly from attendees whether the changes are effective. They are sharing their survey prompts as supplementary material to encourage chairs and committee members to conduct independent internal surveys and see what trends emerge locally, and they suggest repeating the same survey after time has passed or after new faculty members have joined if more rigor is desired. They conclude that it is likely that implementing their suggestions will improve culture and create a safe space to exchange ideas, which has the potential to increase faculty retention and productivity, as well as the meaningfulness of faculty meetings. For a profession that spends more than a sixth of its working life in meetings, the message is that those hours can be reclaimed, redesigned, and made worth attending.

Subject of Research: Strategies for making biomedical engineering faculty meetings more inclusive, productive, and meaningful

Article Title: How to Make Faculty Meetings More Productive, Values-Driven, and Meaningful

Article References: Akpa, B. S., Bell, M. A. L., Bowden, A. K., Cosgriff-Hernandez, E. M., Ferrall-Fairbanks, M. C., Linnes, J. C., Willits, R. K., Moore, E., & Peyton, S. R. (2026). How to Make Faculty Meetings More Productive, Values-Driven, and Meaningful. Annals of Biomedical Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-026-04394-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10439-026-04394-1

Keywords: faculty meetings, biomedical engineering, academic culture, meeting facilitation, inclusion, BME UNITE, survey, departmental governance, leadership training, workplace productivity, faculty retention, agenda design