After extensive research, Forbes stated that there are roughly 55 million meetings happening daily, and nearly 50% of them are a waste of time.

Many businesses don’t realise that their teams time is the most important commodity their business has. If you are in meetings it is often said that “no actual work is being done”, and how many people spend all day in meetings and then have little or no time to execute any of the actions assigned from those sessions.  This leads to disengaged employees and this often goes completely unnoticed.

Steven Rogelberg, a university professor and an organisational psychologist studied the effectiveness of meetings, and found a poor correlation between their cost and effectiveness.  The cost also went beyond time. When analysed including office space costs, technology costs and the organisation of the meeting itself was factored into the results, they became even more concerning.

It is too easy for an employee to book a meeting of company minds.  Conversations that should be reserved for email, Slack, Teams, or even never had at all, get pushed into a gathering of people called a “meeting”.

Four main issues came up in the research; no meeting training, no meeting agenda, no feedback loop regarding effectiveness, and no one owns the outcomes of meetings in general.