“Acute reunionitis” causes large companies to lose $100 million a year

” Time is money. Unnecessary meetings represent $100 million in lost revenue for large companies, according to a new American study that echoes this popular adage.

For this survey, conducted over the summer, Steven Rogelberg, professor and researcher in organizational sciences at the University of North Carolina, asked 632 employees from twenty sectors of activity to sift through their planning and assess how much time they actually spend in meetings, what they get out of it and how they respond to invitations. Result: they spend an average of 18 hours per week in 17.7 meetings, and only refuse 14% of invitations, while they would prefer not to participate in 31% of them. Reluctant attendance at unnecessary meetings wastes approximately $25,000 per employee per year, or $101 million per year in organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

“Meetings control us, and unnecessary ones are a huge cost,” Steven Rogelberg told Bloomberg. “You get an invitation to a meeting and you think, ‘I don’t need to be there.’ And yet you agree. Why ? asks the author of the bestseller “The Surprising Science of Meetings: How to Lead Your Team for Optimal Performance” and who has been studying these corporate meetings since the early 2000s.

Conformity in the workplace

Among the explanations advanced, conformity in the workplace: many people accept invitations because it is the norm. Others don’t want to offend the event organizer by refusing, come across as unmotivated, or even abhor fishing for information a posteriori.

On the managers’ side, they don’t bother either to give instructions for refusing a rout (who to warn, when, how, etc.), laments Steven Rogelberg. Partly because they’re often the ones driving them and they like the sense of control they provide, he says. The survey also specifies that women are more reluctant than men to avoid these appointments, for fear of having to disturb their colleagues later.

Despite the Covid pandemic, which has moved many lines in the business world (teleworking, flex office), the tyranny of meetings has not really changed. Previous research by Steven Rogelberg shows that poorly managed meetings can damage employee engagement, even reinforcing their intention to quit, and that the torpor that can prevail in them has increased during the pandemic, due to from shifting to telecommuting and virtual meetings galore.

Three times more meeting time

Data provided by Microsoft, based on thousands of users of its software, revealed that the time spent in meetings has more than tripled since February 2020, and the number of weekly meetings has more than doubled. These virtual palavers “tend to be more cognitively demanding, more prone to distraction, and less effective in many ways than their in-person counterparts,” concluded a team of researchers in another recent study of how modes of communication changed just after the first confinements linked to Covid.

Managers, who spend about 20% more time on average in meetings than their employees, must not only be more selective when they organize a meeting, but also allow more freedom to refuse, insists Steven Rogelberg. Another number to take with caution, again according to Microsoft: while meeting rejections have increased by 84% in the last year, overlapping slots have also increased by 46% – this explains it.

According to the meeting expert, agendas should be framed as a set of questions to be answered, not as topics to be brushed aside. “If you have no questions in mind, you should not have organized this meeting,” he said. According to his survey, inviting employees to join only part of the meeting also helps improve its effectiveness. Otherwise, people disconnect: Respondents said they end up multitasking for 70% of a pointless meeting.

With Bloomberg