Many people say that no one wants to offend the meeting organizer except him. (Representative)
Unnecessary meetings are a $100 million mistake at large companies, according to a new survey that shows workers don’t need to be in about a third of the appointments they attend.
A summer survey by Steven Roselberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology, and management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asked 632 employees in 20 industries to study their weekly calendars and find out how much time they actually spent in meetings. Spent. , what they got from them and how they responded to invitations. Employees spend an average of 18 hours a week in meetings, and they decline only 14% of invites, even though they prefer to return to 31% of them. Reluctantly going to non-critical meetings wastes approximately $25,000 annually per employee, and projects $101 million a year for any organization with more than 5,000 employees.
“Meetings control us, and bad meetings come at a heavy cost,” said Rogelberg, who has researched meetings for two decades. “You get an invitation to a meeting and say, ‘I don’t need to be there,’ yet you say yes – why?”
Many say yes because it’s a workplace norm – no one wants to annoy the meeting organizer by leaving, or making coworkers think they’re not busy. Hate to chase updates of what happened to others. Most managers don’t talk to their employees about how and when to decline meetings, because they usually lead them and like the sense of control they provide, Rosselberg said. The survey found that women were more concerned about declining meetings than men because of fear of coworkers harassing them to speed them up later.
“Personally, there are days and weeks when my meetings are driving me,” said Betsy Peters, vice president of marketing and product strategy at Riva, an Alberta-based provider of revenue-data software for the financial services sector. Peters needed to get better control over Riva’s meetings when the pandemic hit and workers moved away, so she asked Rosselberg to speak to Riva’s 100 or more employees. Since then, they’ve gotten better at narrowing down the invite list, and also shortened all meetings so people can take summary notes or prepare for their next call.
“The tyranny of a 30-minute meeting is over,” she said. “We’ve moved the needle on meetings.”
However, some companies have. Roselberg’s earlier research found that poorly managed meetings can hurt employee engagement and even increase their intention to leave, and the shift to remote work and videoconferencing has led to the pandemic. During the meetings the atmosphere deteriorated. Based on the thousands of users of its workplace software, Microsoft Corp. Data from the U.S. found that the time spent in meetings has more than tripled since February 2020, and the number of weekly meetings has more than doubled. A team of researchers concluded in a recent study that those in virtual meetings are “more cognitively demanding, more prone to distraction, and less effective in many ways than their in-person counterparts,” examined Learned how the communication pattern changed after the pandemic lockdown hit. in 2020.
Roselberg said that managers, who spend about 20% more time in meetings than the average employee, need to be more prudent in making calls and more frank about letting people decline them. According to recent data from Microsoft, drop in meetings increased by 84% over the previous year, but this is likely due to the fact that overlapping meetings increased by 46% during the same period.
The agenda should be prepared as a set of questions and not as a set of topics. “If you can’t think of any questions, you shouldn’t have held the meeting,” he said. The survey found that simply inviting people to a meeting helps improve their efficacy. Otherwise, people tune out: Respondents to Roselberg’s survey said they end up multitasking during 70% of an unnecessary meeting.
To estimate the cost of unnecessary meetings, Rosselberg calculated employees’ hourly wages based on their self-reported wages and hours worked per week, then used those figures to represent firms of different sizes. Extrapolated. Otter.ai Inc., whose software helps companies record and transcribe meetings, funded and participated in studies.
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