43% Of Meetings Could Be Avoided Without Any Impact, Says Survey

Non-executives spend an average of 10.6 hours a week in meetings, the Future Forum survey found and said that 43 per cent of them could be done away with

Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $100 million a year at big organizations, says a survey.

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Many times employees have found useless meetings hampering their productivity. A recent study revealed that executives spend an average of 25 hours a week in meetings, and nearly half of those Zoom calls and project updates could disappear without any negative impact.

The survey of more than 10,000 desk workers by Future Forum also found that business leaders attend unproductive meetings as they thought it would be a good use of time, but ultimately wasn't. Future Forum is a research consortium backed by Salesforce Inc.-owned Slack Technologies

Fear of missing out

Also, some attended meetings due to the fear of missing something important, and to show their own manager they're working, the survey said. For those lower down the corporate ladder, the most common reason for showing up is because they don't have a choice.

The survey comes amid organizations trying to determine if meetings really matter, and which meetings could be jettisoned in an increasingly hybrid workplace when employees are working from different locations.

Shopify Inc, the Canadian e-commerce site, is on its way to eliminate 320,000 hours of meetings this year. It aims to bring to an end all recurring meetings with more than two people, doing away with meetings on Wednesday, and limiting big gatherings, along with encouraging staff to decline some invites.

Meetings cost about $100 million a year

Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $100 million a year at big organizations, according to a separate survey. The survey found that workers only decline 14 per cent of invites even though they'd prefer to back out of 31 per cent of them.

One-on-one meetings held virtually increased from 17 per cent in 2020 to 42 per cent last year, a study of 48 million meetings from collaboration analytics firm Vyopta found, a sign that companies are trying to rein in participants at least, if not overall meetings.

While workplace scheduling apps like Calendly reveal that some of its customers have got smarter when it comes to scheduling meetings that matter.

Non-executives spend an average of 10.6 hours a week in meetings, the Future Forum survey found, and said that 43 per cent of them could be done away with.

 Common tactics to reduce meeting overload include trimming the invite list, sending agendas in advance, and making sure the actual meeting tackles a set of thorny questions, not just a rundown of topics.

"There's no one-size-fits-all approach to eliminating unnecessary meetings," said Brian Elliott, a Slack executive who oversees the Future Forum research. "So get comfortable with experimenting and iterating."