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Meetings punctuate our professional schedules. But managers and employees complain about spending too much time on these interviews, which take place both remotely and in person. However, an American survey shows that we spend less time in meetings than a few years ago.
The numbers speak for themselves. Office workers spend an average of 14.8 hours per week in meetings, according to a report from the company Reclaim.ai carried out with 1,300 active people. This represents a decrease of 31.2% compared to the 21.5 hours of weekly meetings recorded in 2021.
This reduction in time spent in meetings may seem surprising as employees complain of being constantly taken up by “conf calls”, “briefings” and other “meetings”. A term has even been invented to denounce this overdose of corporate meetings: reunionitis.
If we are to believe the specialists at Reclaim.ai, reunionitis reached its peak during the Covid crisis. Managers used and abused videoconferencing to keep everyone connected and engaged, to the great dismay of their colleagues who emerged exhausted from this series of online meetings. “Although teleworking is still very widespread, we have moved to a more hybrid form of work where teams oscillate between face-to-face and remote work, but they exchange much more spontaneously, face-to-face, than in 2021“, we can read in the Reclaim.ai report.
Although workers spend fewer hours in meetings than a few years ago, they continue to attend a large number of professional interviews. They spend 37% of their time chatting with their colleagues in search of new ideas, or (more or less) discreetly checking their phone, hoping that no one will take them to task. This represents 17.1 meetings per week, all professional categories combined.
Surprisingly, meetings have been getting longer since 2021. Back then, they lasted an average of 50.6 minutes. We are now around 52 minutes. However, not all of us have such a long attention span. We should therefore review, in advance, the organization of conferences between colleagues to make them shorter and, by extension, productive.
This need is all the more pressing as every meeting has a cost. Reclaim.ai estimates that the time each employee spends meeting with colleagues costs their employer $29,129 (around 27,155 euros), per person. Enough to push companies like Shopify to develop tools measuring the financial cost of a work meeting. The objective being to optimize costs, and not to purely and simply abolish these times of exchange which remain structuring in office life.