US Businesses Waste $70 Billion on Meetings Every Year
A 2014 study by Bain and Company found that large businesses spend about 15% of their time in meetings. However, in one survey, business leaders said they felt that 67% of all meetings aren't productive, and another study found that unproductive meetings in the US alone probably cost more than $70 billion a year!
Why are so many meetings unproductive? One reason is that between 40% and 50% of them start late, according to Joseph Allen of the University of Nebraska Omaha. Many people also don't pay attention during meetings. According to Atlassian, an Australian technology company, 91% of workers say they've daydreamed during meetings, 73% have done other work, and 39% have slept.
Remote workers – people who work from home – have even more trouble focusing during meetings, with 48% saying family members interrupt them and 40% having problems with noise at home.
Companies are finding ways to avoid wasting time in meetings. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes that if a person has nothing to say during a meeting, then they should be allowed to leave. "It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time," Musk wrote in a letter to Tesla employees.
Some companies have "no-meeting" days. Facebook employees avoid meetings on Wednesdays, and Moveline, a moving company, asks its employees to use its no-meeting Tuesdays to work on solving one important problem.
Other companies only allow meetings during certain hours each day so that employees can focus on their work during the other times.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, follows the "two-pizza rule": a meeting should be small enough that two pizzas would feed the whole group. If not, the meeting would probably be too big to be productive.
