How Many People Should Be Invited to Attend a Meeting?

We’ve all experienced being in work meetings where there are simply too many attendees and you know exactly how it goes: Not everyone gets a chance to speak, too many voices and ideas are going back and forth, and in the end, decision-making quality suffers.

It turns out there are answers backed by organizational behavior research as to how many meeting participants are too many, and what the right number is for the best meeting outcomes.

Fellow also studied the meeting habits of 30,000 organizations in our 2024 State of Meetings Report. In that report, we found out how many people we’re actually inviting to meetings. 

Combined, this information will help you assess whether you’re putting your meetings at risk of inefficiency by inviting too many people, and know the best practices moving forward.

The rule of eight for meetings

The ideal number of attendees for the most productive meetings is seven or fewer.

That’s according to research by Robert Sutton, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. He looked at research on group size and determined that eight people is the tipping point when meetings turn from productive to chaotic and unprepared.

Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. Harvard’s J. Richard Hackman determined that four to six is the best team size for most tasks. 

So what happens when there are eight or more attendees in a meeting? Here are some repercussions, according to Harvard Business Review:

• Not everyone is able to participate and be equally heard
• Back-and-forth conversations are replaced by everyone trying to get a word in
• Time is wasted while everyone gets caught up on the issues at hand
• Tough topics are avoided
• Engagement wanes as the conversation goes off-track

As the meeting goes on and becomes less productive, participants begin to disengage, further exacerbating a vicious cycle. Meetings that are too big just perpetuate bad outcomes.

Productive meetings are those in which the agenda is followed and decisions are made — you simply can’t achieve that when there are too many meeting participants.

How many people are we inviting to meetings?

According to Fellow’s 2024 State of Meetings report, most meetings do follow the rule of eight, whether organizers know about the rule or not. Across all company sizes, 80.8% of meetings have fewer than eight attendees, compared to an average of 19.2% of meetings with eight or more people.

What’s most interesting is that the number of meetings with more than eight people grows as a company grows. Organizations with under 200 people had 15.6% of meetings with eight or more people, and therefore at risk of being inefficient. By contrast, organizations with 1,000 or more employees had 22% of meetings with eight or more people.

This isn’t surprising — as a company adds new employees and teams grow, it can be difficult to cut back meetings to a more reasonable size. It’s also a reality check for large companies to keep an eye out for meetings that have become unproductive due to too many attendees.

It’s worth noting that these are organizations that already use Fellow — an AI meeting note taker proven to build healthy meeting habits and reduce inefficient meetings. The attendee divide for those not using a tool like Fellow may look different.

We also looked at which departments tend to have larger meetings, and found Operations teams at large companies are at the top, with six hours per week spent in meetings with eight or more people.

Knowing what these different departments do, we can draw some conclusions about why some have larger meetings than others. Operations, for example, may need to have meetings that bring together key decision-makers and leaders. Legal may need to make complex decisions and want more people to weigh in.

On the other end of the spectrum, CS & Support as well as Sales spend more time than others in one-on-one calls with customers and prospects.

Breaking the rules: When is it ok to invite more than 8 people to a meeting?

While the rule of eight is a great principle to follow, sometimes it’s okay to break the rules.

One example is company-wide Town Hall Meetings. Sometimes the most efficient way to disperse information is to invite all employees to a single meeting, whether for major change announcements, a regularly scheduled business update, or to build morale with a fun event. 

There are also different styles of meetings that can require more people. The rule of eight mainly applies to meetings where a decision needs to be made, but that’s not always the goal.

How to decide who to invite to a meeting

By now you may be thinking about future meetings and how you’re going to limit the invite list. Some managers default to simply inviting anyone with any connection to the topic of a meeting, but that’s not the best practice.

Here are some questions to ask when determining who to invite.

1. Does a decision need to be made or is this just a meeting for updates or brainstorming?
2. Who are the key decision-makers?
3. Who will be most impacted by decisions made at this meeting?
4. Who has the most information about what will be discussed?
5. Who will learn the most from participating in this meeting?
6. Has anyone explicitly asked to be included in this meeting?
7. Can someone skip attending live and simply get the recording and key decisions after?

If smaller meetings are more productive meetings, the overall goal is to limit attendees to those who truly need to be there.

You should also keep in mind that even if someone meets some of the above criteria, they don’t necessarily need to attend to gain value from the meeting. 

Using Fellow, for example, you can record meetings using the Fellow AI Copilot. After the meeting, Fellow will place the recording in a company library, along with a transcript, AI summary, and notes on any action items or decisions made. Anyone who missed the meeting who had access to the calendar event can simply access the recording and recap and get caught up.

Meetings matter, and so does meeting size

Productive meetings are a vital part of how companies get work done. It’s a place to build relationships, make important decisions, and push towards goals.

However, meetings can only accomplish their goals if they’re run efficiently with as little time wasted as possible. One method to ensure that happens is to follow the rule of eight for most meetings, and only go beyond that if the meeting’s purpose necessitates it.

Start optimizing your meeting invitations for productivity and see the change for yourself.