A new study reveals that a third of meetings are unnecessary. Elon Musk has the solution

It's not news that everyone thinks meetings are out of control. I write articles covering reports and expert commentary repeating the same thing over and over for almost a decade. But despite all that hand-twisting, the problem persists. In fact, according to some studies, it seems to get worse.

By replacing ad-hoc, informal chats with scheduled online conversations, the pandemic has actually increased the total time most professionals spend in meetings. How much of that 20 or so hours per week (according to which study you believe) is actually productive?

A new study by automated transcription service Otter.ai and University of North Carolina psychologist Steven Rogelberg has come to a depressing conclusion. Surveying more than 600 employees across a wide range of industries, they found that workers consider a third of meetings to be completely unnecessary.

Are you okay with wasting $25,000 per employee per year?

Wasting a third of your working day listening to someone on a drone on irrelevant topics is of course very frustrating for employees. But the Otter.ai study underscores how ridiculous this should be from the perspective of companies and their executives.

"Companies pay an average of $80,000 per professional employee to attend meetings each year and $25,000 (31%) for attending meetings deemed 'unnecessary'," the study concludes. Can you think of anything better to do with $25,000 per year per employee? I guess the answer is yes, which makes it even more shocking that the research also found that 78% of managers have never brought up the issue with employees.

Otter.ai helps companies automatically transcribe meetings so that employees can't attend and just read what happened later, so this research is obviously self-serving. But it also ties in with a ton of other studies, including earlier work by Rogelberg, that show the same thing: exact numbers may differ slightly, but all agree that ridiculous time is wasted on pointless meetings. .

Elon Musk to the rescue

If managers have been given this problem ad nauseam, why can't they fix it? According to Otter's research, the answer basically comes down to company culture. "Most employees cite 'organizational norms' and lack of conversation about when meetings can be skipped as the main reason they feel the need to attend meetings, even though they deem their presence unnecessary" , reports the company. Basically, workers worry about looking bad or offending people if they say no to an unnecessary meeting.

That's why managers who really want to do something meaningful about this issue might want to take a page from Elon Musk's playbook and address the underlying issue with standards and how the politeness at work is defined head-on.

“Walk out of a meeting or drop a call as soon as it's obvious you're not adding value. It's not rude to leave, it's rude to make someone stay and waste their time,” Musk reportedly said. Tesla employees. By setting the tone from the top, Musk makes it socially acceptable to politely decline a meeting rather than sit there fidgeting for an hour when you could be doing something much more productive.