Unnecessary Meetings are a More Serious Problem Than You’d Think

Anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time in a professional occupation knows that meetings come with the territory. After all, running a business requires a lot of coordination, communication, and teamwork, and meetings are opportunities for employees to gather and discuss important business-related ideas. However, the amount of time wasted and misused on unnecessary meetings is a topic of concern.

A recent report from Asana, the Anatomy of Work global index, details just how much time businesses spend on meetings and other minutiae, which the report titles “work about work.” If you think about it, this phrase makes a lot of sense. Meetings are often about work, but there is no work actually being done in them. The report in question asked 9,615 knowledge workers from the United States, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan what issues crop up which prevent them from getting work done.

These workers reported that, on average, they spent 58% of their workdays on “work about work”, 33% of their days on skilled work, and 9% of their days on strategic work.

We’d like you to ask yourself, “Is this why I hired my employees? So they can spend the majority of their time in meetings, not getting work done?”

It’s a hard reality to grasp, especially because organization is key to a lot of business’ success. Asana defines “work about work” as any activities other than the skilled work you were hired to do. For example, if you have a sales analyst who is stuck in endless logistics meetings rather than talking to prospective customers, or a programmer who hasn’t touched code in three days because they are stuck in planning meetings, there’s “work about work” involved.

To break these numbers down a bit more, consider the following statistics:

• Executives spend 3.6 hours per week on average in unnecessary meetings.
• Knowledge workers spend 2.8 hours per week on average in unnecessary meetings.
• Executives are 30% more likely to miss a deadline than the average worker due to phone or video meetings.
• 32% of workers claim that video calls take up more time than they did one year ago.
• 22% of workers claim that audio calls take up more time than they did one year ago.

So, how would you like to reclaim all of that lost time?

Obviously meetings aren’t going to go away—that’s just part of running a business, unfortunately—but you can strategically use technology solutions to streamline them and make them less of a drain on your resources. To help your team collaborate and communicate more effectively so that work about work doesn’t consume their workdays, we recommend you contact Horne & Benik to discuss how technology solutions can make meetings go more smoothly and efficiently. To learn more, call us today at (603) 499-4400.