If you're feeling bogged down at work by meetings, you definitely aren't alone. New research indicates the volume of work meetings has grown in the years since the pandemic -- overwhelming employees and costing companies millions.
An analysis by monitoring and analytics platform Vyopta shows that returning to the office did not reduce virtual meetings -- even as in-office meetings more than doubled.
For the analysis, researchers evaluated more than 40 million meetings from 11 organizations, spanning more than 450,000 unique employees. The data included two six-week snapshots from Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 from remote or hybrid meetings facilitated by online platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex or Zoom. Fully in-person meetings were not considered.
As many organizations implemented return to office policies over the past two to three years, researchers expected to see a drop in virtual meeting volume -- but that wasn't the case.
The findings, published in the Harvard Business Review, indicate that workers attended an average of 8.3 meetings per week in 2021, which jumped to 10.3 in 2022. That number stayed relatively unchanged last year at 10.1 meetings per week. The analysis said the slight reduction was due to fewer one-on-ones, which are easiest to replace when fully in-person.
This number staying high represents an important shift in employee preference, according to Mike Tolliver, Vyopta's director of product management, and Jonathan Sass, vice president of product and marketing at Vyopta.
"By default, most meeting invites include a virtual link and participants will often choose to join via video even when others are in the same office. Some also prefer virtual meetings because they allow for recording, transcription, and AI note summaries that aren't available otherwise. Other factors are at play as well, but the takeaway is that in-person collaborative behaviors are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic norms," Tolliver and Sass wrote in the Harvard Business Review.
The analysis also found that "no-participation" rates (staying on mute for the entirety of the meeting) are increasing, costing organizations millions. In 2023, the "no-participation" rate was 7.2% for small group meetings, up from 4.8% in 2022. Workers are also enabling their cameras less often -- the first downward trend for this metric since early 2020.
Vyopta says the data "further supports the notion that the cost of unnecessary meetings is increasing."
"Assuming an average employee compensation of $50/hour, and an average employee count of approximately 40,000, in 2022 the cost of no-participation meeting attendance was $10.2 million per organization. In 2023, that number rose to $19.1 million," Tolliver and Sass wrote.
Employees are also getting weighed down by that "digital debt." According to recent research from Microsoft, 68% of people say they don't have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday.
Microsoft found the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating (in meetings, email and chat) and 43% creating (in documents, spreadsheets and presentations). The heaviest email users (top 25%) spend 8.8 hours a week on email, while and the heaviest meeting users (top 25%) spend 7.5 hours a week in meetings.
"People report that the number one productivity disruptor is inefficient meetings, followed closely by having too many meetings," Microsoft noted. "Most people say it's difficult to brainstorm in a virtual meeting (58%) or catch up if they joined a meeting late (57%), that next steps at the end of a meeting are unclear (55%), and that it's hard to summarize what happens (56%)."
Microsoft says the data shows a clear need to make meetings better.