A recent poll indicated that attending meetings for longer than two hours each day can reduce productivity, capping a regular occurrence that many employees have grown to detest.
According to a poll conducted by Salesforce-owned Slack Technologies among more than 10,000 desk workers worldwide, most people discovered that two hours of meetings was the tipping point. More than twice as many respondents claimed they didn’t have enough time to concentrate on important work rather than meetings as those who claimed they spend excessive amounts of time in conference rooms or on Zoom conversations.
Over 50% of CEOs surveyed claimed to have too many meetings, and 27% of regular employees agreed. Overwhelming meeting schedules might push employees to work after hours, which is something that around 20% of employees do on a weekly basis. Whether the meetings took place in person or virtually, the results were the same.
Christina Janzer, senior vice president of research and analytics at Slack, stated, “Every minute you spend in meetings is a minute you spend not focusing.” “There is value in meetings, but quality time spent in focus is so important.”
The study is the most recent to highlight the detrimental impacts of excessive or ineffective meetings—a problem that Slack, Shopify Inc., and other businesses have been attempting to address to varied degrees of success. According to earlier studies, big businesses squander US$100 million (RM466.35 million) year on pointless meetings.
Strategies to cut down on meetings might be different: For instance, Slack removes internal meetings on Fridays and cancels them entirely for a whole week twice a quarter. Reducing Friday meetings is something that other businesses also implement. Shopify developed a technology that calculates the cost of each meeting and is integrated into the calendars of workers. Businesses occasionally urge employees to turn down meetings.
The results coincide with the development of new technologies that can record a meeting’s highlights and email employees a summary that includes the decided-upon next actions at a later time.
Remarkably, Slack’s study also revealed that a tiny portion of workers believe they spend too little time in meetings. These workers are usually younger or have been there for less than a year. Workers from the US, UK, Japan, Germany, France, and Australia were included in the study.
