New research confirms what we’ve long suspected, that we all spend too long in meetings.
What’s worse, is that 40% of those questioned said that half of those meetings were unnecessary.
The research, which comes from eShare, found that UK office workers are spending 25% of their working week preparing for and attending meetings.
The survey discovered that the average worker attends 3.7 meetings every week, spending one hour nine minutes preparing for each meeting and one hour 22 minutes actually attending it. This means that in any given working week, office workers are spending more than a day preparing for, and attending meetings. Run this across a 40-year career and that equates to a total of 17,470 hours – two entire years of someone’s life, or around ten years of work time.
CEO of eShare Alister Esam said: “Meetings are an integral part of business life, but many are inefficient, with incorrect agendas and attendees unable to locate the required background information when they need it. With the average office worker spending more than a day every week on meetings, addressing the waste of hours resulting from ineffective and inefficient meetings could be the single biggest boost to productivity for any organisation.
“With many office workers stating that most meetings they attend are inefficient and could be shorter, it is clear that the entire meeting process needs to be addressed. Whether it is a large corporate or an SME, too much valuable resource is being wasted in inefficient meetings, which could be better spent elsewhere. Changing this will entail a collective focus on the approach to meetings across the business world, but smaller steps can be taken such as using the appropriate digital tools for meetings instead of traditional paper-based approaches.”
To help us cope with the stress, eShare has recently launched an app which lets people organise meetings. It’s called MeetingSquared for those to add to their lists of apps.
