Researchers recently surveyed hundreds of employees across nearly two dozen industries about the amount of time they spend in meetings. They discovered that employees spend an average of 18 hours a week in meetings.
Steven Rogelberg is a professor of organizational science, psychology and management at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte, and conducted the study. He told KMOX that some people spent 35, even 40 hours a week in meetings, and that people are reluctant to say no to meetings.
"One of the most interesting pieces of the study was just people's reticence to decline a meeting invite. And women actually had even higher reticence to do that," Rogelberg said. "And related to that, I think what was really intriguing is just the fact that people that employees report that their manager never even talks to them about when it's okay to decline a meeting."
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He said there are certain ways to make sure meetings are more meaningful, including leaders being more intentional about their invite lists and making sure meetings are only called when interaction is truly necessary.
"We're basically honoring employees time, we're good stewards of others' time," he said. "So running meetings better is obviously the most optimal solution, but then start to have conversations around when to invite and when not to invite, the responsibilities that we have for people, on how we can keep them in the loop."
Most jarring to the researchers was the amount of money it costs both employees and companies to spend so much time in unecessary meetings.
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"If you look at the percentage of unnecessary meetings, it costs around $25,000 a year for an employee, and then when you start compounding that across lots of employees, that number can get extremely high," Rogelberg said. "So for example, in an organization with 5000 employees, with a typical rate of unnecessary meetings that we found, that number can be upwards of $50 million a year invested in unnecessary meetings."
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