The true cost of meetings, by the numbers
- The average worker spends about 37% of their time at work in meetings or coordinating them.
- Workers spend about half a workday per week just scheduling meetings.
- That time spent in meetings and managing them costs employers an annual average of over $29,000.
- The average worker attends about 6 team and internal meetings a week, about 5 one-on-one meetings, and about 5 external meetings.
- Internal meetings are the most common recurring meeting but also most often rescheduled. Coordinating and rescheduling those costs employers an average of over $5,000 annually.
- Since February 2020, people are in three times more Microsoft Teams meetings and calls per week – a 192% increase.
- Over 60% of teams meeting or exceeding growth targets spend 3 to 5 hours a week in meetings that actually contribute to reaching company goals, compared to 41% of those on less successful teams.
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Packed calendars, scheduling conflicts and different time zones are some factors driving meetings to swallow employees’ workdays, ultimately taking them away from completing real tasks and actually being productive. It’s an issue that’s only gotten worse with hybrid work and since much of our work is still done virtually.
“It’s become so easy to get people into a video conference that it’s sucking up more time and energy than it did even before the pandemic,” said Rob Sadow, CEO and cofounder of Scoop, a hybrid work planning tools provider.
Employees in a survey last year including over 30,000 respondents from Microsoft listed inefficient meetings as the top disruption to their own productivity.
“They should really be spending their time on having high-quality meetings and doing things that move the business forward or move their careers forward,” said Henry Shapiro, Reclaim AI co-founder.
That cost of meetings data comes from Reclaim AI, which conducted a survey among over 1,300 workers. Reclaim AI also recently launched a new Smart Meetings tool that automates meeting scheduling across teams taking time zones and availability into account. To determine the cost of meetings and time spent coordinating them, Reclaim took the average salary of $59,384 and multiplied it by an average operational cost at roughly 1.3 times the base salary. The results showed that Tspent in meetings and managing them costs employers an annual average of over $29,000.
Experts predict this issue will lessen in the next decade as AI tools are increasingly being integrated into workflows, but until then employees are drowning.
“There are lots of people in an organization whose calendars are busy enough that they would really merit an executive assistant,” said Shapiro. “The current kind of solution for organizations is sort of doing nothing, basically it’s kind of just saying hey you gotta figure this out, this is just part of you doing your job,” he said.
Reclaim AI’s tool is one recent solution aiming to solve the issue of meetings swallowing most of the workday. Calendly is another popular option, though isn’t as automated. Instead, Calendly allows others to see your availability and book meetings during an open time slot.
Some companies have chosen to really clamp down on meetings, like Asana and Slack. Asana conducted an experiment where employees were asked to decide which recurring meetings they thought lacked value and instructed to remove those with five or fewer attendees from their calendars for 2 days. They developed a rating system for staff to decide the value of their meetings, asking them to first rank the impact of meetings, then the effort required with preparation and follow-up coordination.
It had a major impact, with meeting lengths today now averaging about 15 minutes, versus 30 minutes prior. And weekly meetings were moved to every other week or month while those deemed totally unnecessary were canceled entirely.
Those changes led employees to save an average of 11 hours per month, freeing up time that would’ve been spent attending and coordinating meetings and enabling them to work on other tasks with that time.
Slack employs a “no meetings Fridays” protocol, where no internal meetings are scheduled and employees are expected to instead do more focused work. Such efforts, which focus on the quality of meetings rather than number of times spent touching base, are how companies should be considering this, said Jessica Gilmartin, CMO at Calendly.
“Meetings get a real bad rep because they tend to not be really helpful. But millions and millions of people rely on meetings to get their jobs done,” Gilmartin said. “If you think about internal meetings, that is where decisions get made, that is where people collaborate and they communicate, and they can make decisions that allow them to move forward.”
“Meetings should be there to not to have a readout of information, meetings should be there to make decisions and move work forward,” she said.
A Calendly survey found a dramatic difference in productivity among employees who said their meetings are productive, versus those who said their meetings aren’t productive, she said.
Calendly looked at successful teams versus those that are less successful, and found 61% of successful teams (those meeting or exceeding growth targets) spend three to five hours a week in meetings that actually contribute to reaching company goals, compared to 41% of those on less successful teams.
And a majority of those on successful teams said they feel there’s enough time in their workday to both build relationships with customers, prospects, team members, and others, while also handling transactional tasks, compared to just 43% of those on less successful teams, that report found.
Tools that make it easier to schedule meetings could have the unintended consequence of leading to more meetings in general, which means ensuring those meetings are quality will be key moving forward.
“Half the battle I think is encouraging meeting attendees ahead of time to be more intentional around that time,” Sadow said. Some other tools that can help include Slack polls, where teams can vote on whether or not they need to meet that day.
“In some ways I think the most powerful tools are the ones that actually pushed us out of having meetings all together when they’re not really valuable,” Sadow said. “It’s not as if employees, if they have more hours in meetings, will just work for more hours over the course of the week. What ends up happening is that meeting time bumps other things that maybe should’ve been prioritized this week end up happening next week, or next month,” he said.