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Meetings punctuate our professional schedules. In principle, these interviews can take place at any time during the work week. But a new survey tells us that they often take place on Wednesdays.
Children’s Day is the one that companies favor for organizing a meeting, especially in person. Indeed, Tuesday would be more popular than Wednesday when it comes to planning a remote team meeting, according to Business Insider which relays the conclusions of the Calendly* report.
This is explained by the fact that a large number of employees work from home at the start of the week, returning smoothly after the weekend. They also tend to make telework on Friday, forcing managers to concentrate team points in the middle of the week.
Because if hybrid work is an increasingly popular method of organization, there are few working people who are ready to go to the office during the weekend to meet with their colleagues. Meetings taking place in person on Saturdays decreased by 17% in 2023 compared to 2021, while those organized on site on Sundays decreased by 29%.
However, it is interesting to note that employees are less reluctant to participate in meetings, physical or virtual, in the early evening. A quarter of professional interviews were held between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. in 2023, according to Calendly. Something to interest those whose internal clock is incompatible with traditional office hours.
Beware of meeting overdose
Generally speaking, meetings are organized during the afternoon to allow as many people as possible to participate, without it disrupting their schedule too much. Some 86% of these moments of exchange and reflection take place between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. However, an increasing number of meetings take place from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (+48% compared to 2021). Managers perhaps organize them before the traditional lunch break to prevent employees from being in the middle of digestion, and therefore unlikely to be proactive in making proposals.
If the methods of holding meetings vary, the employees interviewed by Calendly agree on one point. They cannot tolerate more than six work sessions with their colleagues per day. It should be kept in mind that this figure is an average: some employees are happy to spend long hours in meetings, while others become saturated very quickly.
But there is general agreement that it is better to limit the number of meetings to prevent them from losing effectiveness. Many active people are wondering about the relevance of repeated work meetings. More than one in four office workers believe they spend too much time in these “meetings”, according to a Slack survey, conducted among 10,000 workers in six countries (United States, Australia, France, United Kingdom, Japan, Germany). According to those surveyed, this would prevent them from concentrating and carrying out their missions.
To treat this acute “meetingitis”, some companies are taking measures to make meetings more effective. Others go even further by eliminating almost all of these interviews. But there is no question of abolishing them: these times of exchange between colleagues remain structuring in office life, especially if they are well organized.
*This report was produced in December using data from more than 20 million users of Calendly’s scheduling software. About half of them are based outside the United States.