Who has never sighed when discovering yet another meeting on their professional schedule? Many employees wonder about the relevance of these repeated work meetings… and they would not be wrong, according to this recent study published by the global collaborative communication platform Slack. According to the company, which conducted a survey of 10,000 workers in six countries (United States, Australia, France, United Kingdom, Japan, Germany), “acute unionitis” would seriously harm productivity.
More than one in four office workers, or 27% of respondents, believe they spend “too much time in meetings”. The proportion rises to 55% for executives, who are even more concerned with daily “meetings”. According to the study, the maximum threshold of employee tolerance for meetings is two hours per day. Beyond that, employees feel they are “wasting” their time. Especially since the value of these back-to-back meetings appears highly questionable: despite numerous “briefs”, one employee in five still has the feeling of not having enough time to communicate with their colleagues.
“People who report spending too much time in meetings are twice as likely to report not having enough time to concentrate,” the study further highlights. Several hours of meetings per day – in person or remotely – can sometimes force employees to complete their tasks outside of working hours. The phenomenon is not rare, since two out of five employees admit to working “overtime” hours at least once a week.
However, not all workers share this feeling of weariness with regard to professional meetings. Some would even like to participate more, young people in particular. Often less integrated into these large daily masses, 10% of them regret “too short time” spent in meetings. “These are most often employees who do not exceed 30 years of age and who have less than one year of seniority in the company,” indicates the study. However, this blacklisting would also be harmful to the productivity of the employees concerned, believes Slack. It would also contribute to reducing the “sense of belonging” of newcomers to the company.
Also read Meetingitis: the secrets to making your meetings no longer useless
This investigation is not the first to document the effects of repeated meetings on worker efficiency and well-being. Last year, American academic Steven Rogelberg had already tackled the subject, by questioning more than 600 employees about their time spent in “meetings”. Its conclusions were dizzying: on average, the workers surveyed devoted more than 18 hours per week to it, and reluctantly in 30% of cases. A “waste” of time and money whose damage would reach $25,000 per year per employee, according to the researcher’s conclusions.
In France, working people spend on average six hours per week in meetings, according to a survey conducted by OpinionWay for Slack at the end of 2022. This proportion has jumped since the health crisis, due to the increase in meetings held remotely.
To treat this latent “meeting bug”, some companies have not hesitated to take a radical path, like the French unicorn Alan, which simply deleted meetings from its employees’ schedules. Less radical, the Canadian online commerce platform Shopify has established an internal tool allowing employees to calculate the cost of a meeting. She now urges her employees to think twice before issuing a Teams invitation…
