- Meetings cost companies millions of dollars a year in wasted hours, a new study shows.
- That's in addition to workers saying that meetings are a waste of time.
If you're stuck in a meeting, it's bad news all around.
That's according to a new study of 632 workers conducted by software firm Otter.ai and Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Rogelberg interviewed workers from more than 20 different industries for the recently published report, including technology fields and professional service companies, such as law and engineering firms.
The study found that in addition to causing unnecessary strain on employees, meetings are mostly inessential to a company's bottom line — and in fact, get in the way of it.
Smaller companies with 100 workers would save nearly $2.5 million annually if they dispensed with meetings, Rogelberg found, while firms with at least 5,000 employees would save more than $100 million. On average, the companies Rogelberg interviewed wasted about $25,000 per employee by scheduling them for unnecessary meetings.
The report defines "unnecessary" meetings as ones that employees reported that they could skip, as long as they were kept in the loop.
"Organizations invest a significant amount of money in their employees, and thus, in the meetings they attend," Rogelberg wrote. "There is potential for massive cost-savings… by reducing unnecessary meeting attendance."
Rogelberg's study comes as workers have spent the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic re-evaluating how they feel about productivity and work, fueling the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and union organizing across the United States. Workers have continually voiced their displeasure with common occupational hazards that they'd rather not live with — whether that be commuting, working in an office, or spending extra hours of their workweek feeling like their time is being wasted. With the potential savings for companies in the millions and hundreds of millions, employers have an impetus to avoid meetings, too.
"Reducing unnecessary meeting attendance would not only reduce strain on employees and increase productivity organizationally, it would also help companies drastically cut costs," Rogelberg said.
"The real win for productivity and health isn't the four-day workweek, it's the zero-meeting workday"
Some members of the C-suite have come out against meetings in recent months.
Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote, wrote on Twitter in January that he thinks no meetings are a better solution for worker happiness than a four-day work week, which has also increasingly captured worker imagination.
"The real win for productivity and health isn't the four-day workweek, it's the zero-meeting workday… tools and practices for eliminating meetings are about to boom," predicted Libin, who is currently the CEO of All Turtles, a product studio, and mmhmm, a video communication app. When Libin founded Evernote in 2004, he banned video meetings.
But that's not to say that people aren't enamored with something like a four-day workweek, anyway. Halfway into a six-month trial, British companies experimenting with truncated hours said that their employees are happier and just as productive, for instance.
One study of more than 3 million people found that in April 2020, when millions of Americans were working remotely, the pandemic workday was 48 minutes longer and had more meetings, rather than seeing employees save time.
Respondents told Rogelberg that nearly half of employees said they had too many meetings on their calendars, reporting that they felt "annoyed" and "frustrated" by them.
The news that meetings are financially detrimental to companies adds a new argument to the work culture tug-of-war between managers and their subordinates — a Microsoft study from this year showed that managers don't think their employees are being productive in an increasingly virtual job climate, while workers think their schedules are being padded with unnecessary busy work.
In response to the question of how companies might eventually come around to the side of workers in reducing the number of meetings, many of Rogelberg's respondents expressed cynicism about their current employer's adaptability to change.
"It would require a culture shift away from always being available," one worker said.