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If you work in a company, or are a professional involved with companies, you had and are having your good share of meetings. May be you are a lucky one, but if you are like the rest of us you would agree that many of those meetings are a waste of time.
Many years ago I remember having a meeting at Bellcore, in NJ. When I entered the meeting room I noticed a counter ticking on a wall, with numbers growing and a dollar sign fixed at the end of the counting digits. I asked what it was and my host told me it was a guessing on the cost of the meeting. There was a sensor at the door counting the people entering. The meeting organiser rest the counter when he opened the room and the counter used a salary average to count the cost. There were two counters, one was activated as the door was unlocked, the other was activated when the meeting started. The first counter gave you a feeling of the cost of waiting to have all people in the meeting, the second one the cost of the discussion. The meeting report had to include those numbers in the header.
I found that a very concrete way to provide a sense of value, or waste, a meeting could generate.
I guess today, with id tag that can identify people you can have much more accurate estimate but that rough one was serving the goal of being on time and keeping meeting short and to the point.
Doodle is possibly the tools more used in companies to schedule meetings (19 million meetings arranged through their platform) and it has released its 2019 state of meetings (may be it should have been called 2018 status of meetings since it provides data on 2018… but they also extrapolate some data into 2019) based on data it has accrued in 2018 and interviews to some 6,500 professionals across many industries. Here some facts:
- on average a professional spends 3 hours per week in meetings, 2 hours of them are useless, a waste of time. That means 66% of time in meetings is wasted
- it is expected that 24 billion (!) hours of unnecessary meetings will take place in 2019
- over a third of the professionals interviewed consider the time wasted in meetings as the biggest (avoidable) cost
- 3/4 of professionals indicated that they prefer face to face meeting to video and conference calls
This last figure had me thinking about the progress we have made in digital mediated meetings: clearly not sufficient. People in face to face meeting get distracted and use their computer and cellphones to do their own stuff, but this is somewhat limited by the presence in the same space of other people. That is not the case for online meetings where distraction is much higher, and correspondingly the meeting effectiveness much lower.
Italy is usually in the lower position when considering digital presence and effectiveness. Well, for once in a while I was pleased to see that Italy tanks number one, according to Doodle analyses of data, as quicker to respond to meeting invites, with an average response time of 5h 24minutes, followed by Poland and Israel. The worst? France, where the average time to respond to a meeting invite has been over 10 h in 2018.
