Cost factor unnecessary meetings

The average employee spends around three hours a week in meetings and rates two-thirds of all meetings as unnecessary and a waste of time. This equates to a global cost of around $541 billion per year, according to the Doodle Meeting Status Report 2019. Some 76 percent of workers surveyed clearly prefer face-to-face meetings to calls and video chats. On behalf of Doodle, 6528 employees in Switzerland, Germany, the UK and the USA were surveyed and data from 19 million meetings organized via Doodle were also analyzed.

Making phone calls and writing messages at meetings as a no-go

More than one-third (37 percent) of respondents consider unnecessary meetings to be the biggest cost driver in the organization, and one-third said they have no input into most meetings. But what makes a bad meeting? For more than half of survey participants (55 percent), talking on the phone or writing messages during a meeting is a clear no-go. A clear objective is the main factor for a successful meeting for a majority of respondents (72 percent).

Swiss particularly fond of meetings

Many employees (70 percent of respondents) prefer meetings between 8 a.m. and noon. The study also found that Swiss employees spend significantly more time in meetings (five hours per week on average) than in the US, UK or Germany (three hours per week). Gabriele Ottino, Managing Director of Doodle: "Many companies suffer from the sloppy organization of meetings. In particular, this also affects around 25 percent of employees who attend an average of five or more meetings per week. Through this report, we want to better understand what constitutes a bad meeting and how it affects the workday."

Source: Doodle