Meetings and Individual Work During the Workday: Examining Their Interdependent Impact on Knowledge Workers' Energy

An important issue that has received little attention to date is how different types of work activities may interplay to influence workday energy, a critical resource for individuals' performance at work. Integrating the notion of workday design with event system theory, we examine two prominent types of work activities for knowledge workers-meetings and individual work-to investigate how time allocation and pressure complementarity between them influence workday energy. We conducted two experience sampling studies, one with 245 knowledge workers from diverse organizations and the other with 167 employees from two technology companies. We found a time allocation effect, such that for a given period of the workday (i.e., the morning or the afternoon), the greater the proportion of time a knowledge worker spent in meetings relative to individual work, the less this person engaged in microbreak activities for replenishment during that period. The reduction in microbreak activities, in turn, harmed energy. We also found a pressure complementarity effect in the morning (though not in the afternoon), such that when a meeting involved low pressure in the presence of high-pressure individual work or vice versa, when a meeting involved high pressure in the presence of low-pressure individual work, such complementarity benefited energy. Overall, this research advances our understanding of how everyday work activities relate to knowledge workers' energy and sheds new light on the issue of work and workday designs.