Workers Waste 58% of Their Day in Useless Meetings

We’ve all been in situations where we are asked to attend a meeting that adds next to no value to our work days. Many of these meetings seem like they could have easily been replaced by a quick email, but in spite of the fact that this is the case managers around the world seem to be obsessed with them. What sort of impact do these pointless meetings have on worker productivity? A productivity platform known as Asana has the answers.

It turns out that workers end up wasting as much as 58% of their day on meetings that are absolutely useless with all things having been considered and taken into account. This is not just something that is impacting low level workers either. Top level executives also said that these meetings are making them fall behind on the work that they have been tasked to complete.

30% of top ranking executives said that unnecessary meetings made it less likely that they would meet their deadlines than might have been the case otherwise. Physical meetings can be a nuisance, but meetings that are conducted over video calls were also deemed problematic by 32% of the workers who participated in this survey.

All in all, workers can gain an extra six weeks worth of working hours if they no longer had to attend these meetings. Upper management should consider this because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up giving their workers more time to get things done.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the number of apps that need to be used to stay in touch with coworkers has also increased to 9. This leads to around 15% of these messages getting overlooked since there is so much else that employees need to contend with.

Most industries need to streamline communication so that they can unlock productivity. It will be interesting to see if the findings of this study make any kind of difference on such meetings moving forward.

Read next: 4 Day Work Week Improved Sleep Quality for 40% of Workers
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World