Interesting article. One of the biggest benefits I noticed, when I first started doing contract work remotely, was that I absolutely did not miss meetings. Previously, I had been working for a fairly large corporation and I switched to contracting to do my old job. Without the forced meetings, I was much more productive overall. 99% of the time, the outcome of a meeting was just as easily accomplished via a well thought out email or a quick chat session.

Even better, I noticed that meetings forced people to change their behaviour. They would "work to the meetings" meaning they would orient their efforts in order to be able to contribute in the meeting. Sometimes that meant holding back good ideas till the meeting and other times it meant working specifically on an area just to show it off in a meeting. I think this has a lot to do with the extrovert/introvert argument. The introverts in the office were already worried about the meeting itself so they had to over prepare in order to not be anxious about it. This was a totally foreign concept to the more extroverted in the office.

I personally think the majority of meetings helped management types feel more connected with what's going on, especially if they were mostly disconnected the rest of the time, and for the people involved they ended up being almost always just a waste of time.