On Friday 19th January, Cope Catalunya Radio Station interviewed David Calvo (General Manager of Itemsa) on the midday news programme to discuss a topic of growing interest: Are work meetings productive or are they rather unefficient and a potential loss-making factor for companies?
According to a study published in the Harvard Business School Review, “92% of professionals consider work meetings a waste of time and resources“.
This situation is a source of frustration and dissatisfaction for employees, as 7 out of 10 meetings are unproductive, taking time from their responsibilities and functions, and negatively impacting overall company productivity. Other organisations, such as the French IFOP, went further on the topic and quantified the cost of work meetings for a company, revealing that “200 employees with 2 hours of meetings per week are worth 1 million euros to the firm”.
Are work meetings adding any real value?
Virtual meetings, especially since Covid-19 and the rise of remote and hybrid work environments, highlight interesting but unsettling figures on resource optimization and organizational productivity.
Atlassian’s statistics state that virtual meetings are the biggest waste of time at work for 47% of employees, with 34% of employees considering most meetings to be unnecessary. Furthermore, 91% of participants admitted getting distracted during meetings, 73% used the time for other tasks, and nearly 40% admitted dozing off.
Consequently, more companies are implementing systems to limit unproductive meetings, introducing meeting-free days, setting maximum meeting durations and adopting more informal meeting formats focused on quickly dealing with various issues to ensure that time spent is minimal.
According to the research, an average employee attends 62 meetings per month which lasts between 30 and 60 minutes long, but almost 40% of these meetings last longer than an hour, resulting in a total of 31 hours considered unproductive each month per employee.
However, in Spain, according to Comet, 70% of employees have a positive opinion about the productivity of work meetings, making it a business priority to maximise the time devoted to them.
How can work meetings be effectively organised to optimise productivity?
In Cope Catalunya’s interview with Itemsa’s General Manager, David Calvo, this issue is addressed through Itemsa’s 35 years of experience in consultancy, guiding companies to improve productivity by optimising existing productive resources. This involves analysing tasks, processes and working methods to identify those that do not add value.
Alongside reducing or eliminating non-value-added activities, Itemsa also analyses those that do add value to the business, with a strong focus on finding and developing better methods and processes for optimal execution.
As David mentioned in the interview, Itemsa emphasises proper pre-meeting organisation and planning (agenda, estimated duration, topics to be discussed, technical aspects), defining a SMART, clear and specific objective, as well as setting a meeting time that should never be exceeded, ensuring that only planned issues and meeting objectives are addressed. Participants selection is also crucial, ensuring that only those who need to participate or contribute are invited, while the rest may just need the meeting report.
It is also imperative that all attendees are provided with the information they need to prepare for the meeting and the resources they need to accomplish the objectives and the action plan established during the meeting.
In this way, work meetings will be productive and we can avoid ‘meeting fever’ or excessive meetings without a specific purpose that undermine business productivity.
Specific guidelines for the optimisation of work meetings
Harvard goes further by defining a set of broad guidelines to avoid wasting resources in company meetings:
- Set a maximum duration of 20 minutes for each meeting.
- Limit the number of daily, weekly and monthly meetings.
- Encourage agile meetings by holding them standing.
However, as David emphasised in the interview, it is important to be aware that all companies are different and each one has its own particular requirements and conditions. For example, a manufacturing company with complex processes may need regularly scheduled and long meetings, but less often than a company with more basic processes that needs to report weekly, and so needs to meet more frequently with shorter sessions.
Consequently, previously unknown metrics such as ROTI (Return of Time Investment), a measure that arises from the optimisation of time and people as productive resources, are now widely used to manage productivity and performance by limiting non-value-added activities or tasks.
Likewise, one of the principles that Itemsa considers in all its projects is working from the perspective of Ethical Productivity, emphasizing people and ensuring their global well-being.
