Meetings Suck. We Get It.

Thinking about how to make meetings work is a time-honored tradition. Meetings have always gotten a bad rap and it seems to get worse year after year. Maybe it’s because we’re getting pulled into more and more of them. Perhaps meetings are not prepared for properly, so time is lost just getting up-to-speed.

Harvard Business Review created a calculator for you to see the cost of a single meeting. The point: too much time is spent in meetings and it’s costing you. They deplete company resources and diminish individual contributions. The fix: automate the manual processes that consume preparing for and conducting meetings. This automation is possible today, thanks to tools like Tonkean.

Too Much Time in Meetings

It was estimated that U.S. workers attended 11 million business meetings each day in 1998. By 2013, it grew to 25 million. Two years later, 55 million! It is clearly safe to assume that has increased significantly since then.

When you look at how all that time in meetings impacts individual work weeks, it’s even more alarming. “The average employee spends approximately six hours per week in scheduled meetings…[and]senior managers attend nearly 23 hours of meetings every week.” If meetings keep getting a bad rap, there’s clearly a gap here. If today’s meeting culture is bad for business (and employees), why are we spending so much time in them?

Depleting Company Resources

In a 2017 Harvard Business Review study on meetings, 54% of executives across a broad spectrum of industries reported that their meetings lead “to losses in productivity, collaboration, and well-being for both groups and individuals.” All of these things, unfortunately, also lead to wasting fiscal resources. To be even more specific, A study by the British Psychological Society of American workplaces concluded that “$37 billion is lost annually thanks to unproductive meetings.”

If your organization is wasting significant resources on meetings, why aren’t you actively trying to solve this problem? Every other area of your business is scrutinized in terms of its ROI and value. Apply the same rigor to your meetings.

Diminishing Individual Contribution

People are increasingly getting trapped in meetings for most of their workday. Because of this, they are confronted with a needless burden in order to accomplish their individual assignments. If you are in meetings all day, you’re either multi-tasking in them or you’re working excessively long hours to get through your to-do list. Either way, you’re not able to really focus, and the quality of the work suffers.

According to Harvard Business Review, “every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work…for [others,] schedules riddled with meetings interrupt “deep work” … the ability to focus without distraction…” If your employees’ time to actually focus and get stuff done is not available to them, your company is potentially missing out on valuable individual contributions and ideas.

Automate the Automatable

You can automate the routine, administrative tasks that make meetings unproductive and drag them down: things like gathering status updates, flagging concerns, compiling and analyzing data, and putting it all in one place. So, when you do sit down for your meetings, you can dive right into the real work of problem-solving, strategy and planning. There will always be distractions that derail meetings, but by automating functions that are time killers, you’re creating time to focus on what drives real value.

Our platform handles all of this for you. Let Tonkean’s AI-powered coordinator eliminate the manual chore of tracking down the information you need so you can spend your time leading meetings rather than managing them. Free your team up to do that deep, meaningful, creative, real work that guarantees your business’ success.

Let’s reclaim control and start taking action to get to fewer, more productive meetings. Let Tonkean help you.