During a particularly long-winded and boring meeting, I once tried to calculate how many months or years of my life I had spent trapped in routine talkfests. I gave up as the number grew to alarming heights.
In far too many of these meetings, nothing important got decided, and more often than not, the important things never got discussed. Strategy, new ideas, and ‘other’ are put at the end of all the other items. By the time we get to these, everyone is either too tired or there is no time left to discuss them.
It seems I am not alone in my lament over the hours I have lost in meetings. A survey of 3280 US employees found they spent an average of 4.48 hours a day in meetings. It doesn’t leave much time to actually get things done. It seems we dislike meetings so much that 58% of respondents said they’d rather attend a doctor’s appointment than a work meeting, 25% said they’d rather sit in traffic, and 17% said they’d prefer jury duty. Not a great endorsement.
Other research by UNC Charlotte Professor Steven Rogelberg found that organizations employing 5,000 people waste around $100 million annually on unnecessary gatherings. For a company with 100 employees, the financial savings from eliminating unnecessary meetings would amount to $2.5 million per year.
And never mind the cost in time, energy, and actual dollars. In my former corporate life in a law firm, I once sat in a meeting where all the partners debated for twenty minutes over how to proceed to buy a new toaster for the staff kitchen. In the end, they resolved to get three quotes.
Being new to the industry, I wondered if instead of going to work, I had accidentally walked into the set of The Office TV show. With charge-out rates of over $500 an hour, and eight partners plus various other management team members sitting around the table, the eventual $30 price of the chosen toaster must have made it the most expensive snack aid in history.