Marketing meeting. Schedule a meeting with the team on Tuesday. Send the documents for the Comex meeting. Organize a meeting with the clients who are ordering the new project. At the coffee machine, an impromptu call. In a low voice: “Sorry, I’m in a meeting, I’ll be done in 15 minutes, we’ll make a call afterwards.” Ah yes, the call is the alternative which means meeting, with the induced distance. In short, everything is a meeting, even when you are face to face with your computer. The manager of the 21st century must be in a meeting, this characterizes the importance of his position. Or its emptiness: 44% of employees use their phone and/or their computer during meetings, 54% to do something else unrelated to what they are meeting for (OpinionWay/Empreinte humaine, 2017). This exacerbated meeting is like an imperative that should not be discussed. It also hides what the manager is really doing and highlights either a time-consuming organizational flaw or a misuse of language in practical shield mode (when you’re having a coffee to relax and you’re caught up by the patrol). Difficult to sing “I can’t, I have a swimming pool”… like Keen’v and Rayane Bensetti, to justify an absence under the angry eye of the boss or colleagues. Not all of a manager’s work can be spent on meetings. And yet… “In total, employees spend three weeks a year in meetings and more than twice that for executives” (Ibid). That is 5 and a half years of meetings in 43 years of career for executives.
Abyssal costs for the company
Other figures corroborate this evolution of the managerial task towards meetings which have been linked together at a crazy pace for several years. With a relative productivity if we are to believe the figures: 75% of meetings are a simple sharing of information (Ibid). However, a single weekly meeting of mid-level managers costs an organization $15 million per year (Bain & Company, study on time budgeting in large corporations). Still in doubt? There are now “on line” calculators for which you enter the number and hourly wages of participants, with the duration of the meeting (Harvard Business Review, for example). Another method: in 2021, the average net monthly salary of executives was 4,331 euros, 2,470 euros for intermediate professions, 1,801 euros for employees and 1,863 euros for manual workers (Insee, n° 1938, “Wages in the private sector in 2021”, February 2023). We add approximately 82% of charges to obtain the total cost of each employee and we calculate the cost of the meeting knowing that there are 1,607 hours of work per year for a weekly volume of 35 hours (or 1,778 hours per year for 39 hours per week, see juristique.org). In a company of 200 people, if each one spends 2 hours per week in meetings, the cost for the company at the end of the year is more than one million euros (Perfony). In the United States it’s worse: 62 meetings per month and per employee, one in two considered wasted time, 91% of those present would have their minds elsewhere, 96% would have forgotten at least one and 39% would have fallen asleep at least once. Result: 47% of employees believe that meetings are the number one waste of time… Useless meetings that would cost companies 37 billion dollars (Atlassian).
What if we go to every other meeting or a “day off”?
Other studies show that around 70% of meetings prevent employees from working and accomplishing all their tasks (“Dear Manager, you’re holding too many meetings”, Harvard Business Review, March 2022). These figures require a reorganization to make them more efficient. Prepare the meetings, structure them, give them a duration and plan a report, imagine them standing up so as not to fall asleep or daydream. Adopt Topp: T (theme), O (objective), P (useful participants) and P (plan). Imagine a weekday without a meeting. The start-up Alan (health and welfare insurance) even went further by completely eliminating meetings: “Without a meeting, everyone is in control of their time and effort.” Its two corollaries: forgetting notifications so as not to be disturbed and a lot of work on writing. Rediscover emails for information. And if it is too complicated to kill the meetings, reduce them. Harvard Business Review mounted an experiment in 76 companies over 14 months between 2021 and 2022: employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%.