Useless Meetings Waste Time and $100 Million a Year for Big Companies (bloomberg.com) 75
Unnecessary meetings are a $100 million mistake at big companies, according to a new survey that shows workers probably don't need to be in nearly a third of the appointments they attend. From a report: The survey, conducted over the summer by Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology and management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asked 632 employees across 20 industries to study their weekly calendars and gauge how much time they actually spent in meetings, what they got out of them and how they responded to invitations. Employees spend about 18 hours a week on average in meetings, and they only decline 14% of invites even though they'd prefer to back out of 31% of them. Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $25,000 per employee annually, and projects out to $101 million a year for any organization with more than 5,000 employees.
$100 million?! I don't believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)
That number is way too low.
Re:$100 million?! I don't believe it... (Score:5, Informative)
That number is way too low.
The article conveniently left out the obvious fully-loaded costs of overpriced middle-managers who exist to hold meetings all fucking day.
Not to mention the cost of a corporate building sitting on business-class real estate that a 2-year WFH event pretty much validated is a massive waste. Rent out a coffee shop for those who just gotta "teambuild" and pass diseases in person.
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The article conveniently left out the obvious fully-loaded costs of overpriced middle-managers who exist to hold meetings all fucking day.
The middle managers exist in larger organization more or less as a filter to take care of more mundane tasks related to projects that a VP or C level doesn't need to be involved with all of the time. That is why they hold meetings all fucking day. They need to have a deeper idea of whats going on. I've sat in most chairs in the IT world, so I have a good idea as to what's involved at various levels.
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The article conveniently left out the obvious fully-loaded costs of overpriced middle-managers who exist to hold meetings all fucking day.
The middle managers exist in larger organization more or less as a filter to take care of more mundane tasks related to projects that a VP or C level doesn't need to be involved with all of the time. That is why they hold meetings all fucking day. They need to have a deeper idea of whats going on. I've sat in most chairs in the IT world, so I have a good idea as to what's involved at various levels.
So have I. It's also why I usually try and attend pointless meetings as a proxy, and leave the worker drones alone so they can get shit done to generate an actual status update for the VP or C level instead of pretending to move the chains for the benefit of some middle manager clinging on to a job justification with a meeting schedule.
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The middle managers exist in larger organization more or less as a filter to take care of more mundane tasks related to projects that a VP or C level doesn't need to be involved with all of the time. That is why they hold meetings all fucking day.
There may be some middle managers doing that. Many don't.
Middle management IS the problem (Score:5, Informative)
I wish I had mod points to give.
In my experience, the biggest problem is middle managers using meetings to (unnecessarily) justify their position in the organization. PMs tend to pull together all the resources of a project in on a meeting and then let those resources report their progress. They use meetings as a way to make their job of aggregating data and reporting progress easier. This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what a PM should be doing.
PMs can be useful, but...
I work for an absurdly large state institution (which is an entire rant unto itself). I have been on hour-long calls, technical calls mind you, with 40+ people on them; most of whom couldn't even spell the technology being talked discussed by its acronym. Typically only two or three people speak at any length on these calls...the other 37? They were there just in case they had a tidbit of information that someone wanted. That's essentially an FTE whose only job was to attend one meeting that week.
In this organization, very few (and no managers) see anything wrong with his approach. It is deemed normal.
Re:Middle management IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but,
* It's not the responsibility of the worker bees to make the PM's task easier. It's the PM's responsibility to make the worker bees' tasks easier.
This only works if the PM has a complete understanding of who is doing what and how the worker bees are progressing on a project. And the worker bees providing this information in a meeting makes the PM's task easier.
* The PM should be a single point of contact through which issues can be escalated, otherwise they should stay the hell out of the way and keep quiet.
OK, but not relevant here
* Let the experienced professionals do their job and troubleshoot the issues as they see fit. The know the timeline.
Uh, they actually don't. They may know the timeline for what THEY are working on, but not for other teams or individuals, which is why sometimes it's necessary for a PM to pull people together to get clarification. I can't count the times I've been in the middle of back-and-forth email chains on a project to get clarification when a short meeting with all the parties involved can quickly solve the problem, even when it turns out some folks in the call didn't need to be there..
* The PM should provide a feedback mechanism for reporting progress. If using MS Project, the worker bee should only see the parts relevant to them, not the whole thing. And...
This contradicts what you wrote earlier. The worker bee professional often does not have insight into the timeline or parts that other folks are working on.
* The PM should work with the worker bee to establish the benchmarks/milestones and the timelines, not build them without consultation.
Ideally yes, but sometimes forces outside the PM's control dictate that things get set up without consultation. That is the real world. High paying clients demand ridiculous things at speed all the time, and if you have been hired by them, you either figure out how to deliver it on time, under budget and to a high standard of quality or your company will no longer be employed by them.
* The PM should only reach out to the worker bee if milestones feel like they might be in jeopardy of getting missed.
In the real world, PMs are in communication with worker bees all the time to get clarification on how a project is progressing for a whole host of reasons.
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-1, true but useless
None of what you say refutes the initial claim that round-robin status updates from individual contributors is a bad use of meeting time.
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At my Fortune 500 computer company, many people at all levels existed only to have meetings and pump out PowerPoint slides. When forced to attend, we played "Bullshit Bingo" to try to stay awake. Fortunately they were teleconferernces so we could get away with it.
The "working from home" bunch were the biggest offenders as well as the "remote managers" that were mostly useless.
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The more people you have below you on an org chart, the more prestigious (and higher paid) you are. It is thus in your best interest to hire middle managers below you that do nothing. You are incentivized to do so.
Re: $100 million?! I don't believe it... (Score:5, Informative)
In my organization, we have an entire week of meetings each year. All hands on deck, attendance mandatory. Only the last day, which is at the level of the organizational unit, is actually useful to me as an employee.
Four days out of every employee's schedule, hundreds of employees - that's $millions right there, and we are only one organization.
I've been in other organizations, where meetings were generally useful, but: managers like to hear themselves talk. What could have been an efficient 30-minute meeting would regularly drag out to 2-3 hours. Every week, sometimes twice. So that's at least 100 hours per employee per year. That's probably typical.
So, yeah, $100 million is way low. By a couple of orders of magnitude.
Re:$100 million?! I don't believe it... (Score:5, Informative)
That's $100M per year per company with 5000+ employees, not $100M across all businesses. I, too, found it unrealistically low, but the summary explains that it's talking about each company losing that much.
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Let's be honest; less than half the people posting here bother to read the summary before they post. The percentage of people who actually read the article is smaller than the Planck length.
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The percentage of people who actually read the article is smaller than the Planck length.
Considering that the article is behind a paywall, perhaps that isn't surprising.
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Indeed. It most certainly is. Big companies are incredibly wasteful. That money and productivity has to be pissed away somewhere.
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Measured how? (Score:2)
Meh. Unless they tell me how they verified whether the meetings were or were not "useless", this is basically an opinion article.
The headline should be "meetings that employees say are useless waste time.
Probably they are, but that was not measured, only opined.
Re:Measured how? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a pretty easy metric. If marketing is present in a meeting where engineering is also present, it's very likely pointless.
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Q: I need to know how to market a product. To do so, I need to know what it is and how it works. Who should I ask?
A: The engineer who built it.
Just because a meeting isn't important to you building the product doesn't mean it's not useful to others in the meeting.
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Marketing asking the engineers who built something how to market it? Does that really happen somewhere or are you just making shit up now?
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So the example was very broad, but a case example would be a software organization.
1) Software company is developing a new application.
2) Sales determines the application will sell better if X functionality is added
3) Engineering determines X functionality can be added during the development process without much hassle and proceeds to add it.
4) Marketing finds out about X functionality and determines it would be nice to market this new functionality in upcoming print or ads.
How does it work? What does it d
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Have you really never been to an utterly pointless meeting? Welcome to Earth. We have middle management here.
Then again, it sounds like you "probably" have, so why question it so hard? This is one of those few surveys that can be taken at face value, and "probably" be fairly accurate.
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Have you really never been to an utterly pointless meeting?
Of course we have. I've you've been employed for more than a month in your lifetime there is a near-100% chance you've been in a pointless meeting. However, I believe most of the arguments we're seeing here all something to the effect of "every meeting that isn't directly related to me getting my work done is 100% pointless, every time." which just isn't accurate. Just because you don't want to sit through the annual Benefits meeting, or have the finance nerds go over the company's performance, doesn't
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Have you really never been to an utterly pointless meeting?
Who gets to decide if stuff like that gets included in the "pointless" category?
Well, we know who gets to decide why "pointless" doesn't ever define any meeting; many layers of pointless middle management.
A benefits briefing happens when you're hired, and maybe once a year when benefits change/update. That's not the same thing as meeting a dozen times a week for a "status update" that might be an actual update if you left the actual workers alone long enough to get shit done. A good PM understands this, and often shelters workers from this kind of abuse.
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A benefits briefing happens when you're hired, and maybe once a year when benefits change/update. That's not the same thing as meeting a dozen times a week for a "status update" that might be an actual update if you left the actual workers alone long enough to get shit done. A good PM understands this, and often shelters workers from this kind of abuse.
I will not disagree with you on that one. Just glad we agree there's a distinction. I'm fortunate that we don't do that kind of crap at my current company. My manager spends most of his days in meetings so that us peons don't have to.
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Why "are" you so gay
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Plus they're assuming that the employees would go back to their desks and be productive, which is hardly the case. It's not like you get 8 hours of productivity out of an office worker.
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"Hey workers, area meetings dumb!?"
"Yeah!!!"
"Is work from home effective?"
"Yeah!!!"
"Are bosses greedy!?"
"Yeah!!!"
There may be a lot of truth to many of these things but it is in no way scholarship, nor even informative.
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To further expound on this. There are less tangible benefits to holding meetings. Things like employees feeling included, or exposure to upper management or other departments..
And donuts, don't forget the donuts!
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Seriously, for a site supposedly chock full of tech geeks, so few people are saying "yes, but"? I've been in those meetings where you see an engineer's eyes go from glazed to lit up in an instant, and I'm just an IP attorn
Alternatively.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been mostly remote working for the last couple of years and have accepted way more Team/Zoom/Slack meeting invites than I used to.
Once I join a "non essential" meeting I can half listen in headphones (there might actually be something of use/interest) whilst getting on with some undisturbed coding etc. as people see I'm in a meeting and don't start messaging me unless it's actually important.
I like to call it constructive time management :)
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This has been the biggest productivity boost I've seen since the start of the pandemic. Even better than reduced commute time. It was hard or even impossible to get other work done while in meetings before; now it is routine.
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If it's only 100 million a year (Score:2)
Sort of like how Japanese salarymen work 16 hours a day but not really or how CEOs will tell you they w
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Given the size and scale that's small potatoes. We're talking trillions of dollars here...
Keep in mind that's 100 million per year per company above 5K employees - so it's not quite as small as it seems at first blush. TFS could have been a bit clearer on the point.
It got better with home office (Score:3)
Now you can be in meetings and have the narcissist who loves to hear himself talk drone on while still being able to do some meaningful work.
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Not much of a choice, if it's between the 'narcissist who loves to hear himself talk' and the 'narcissists who assess their work as far more important than this meeting'.
Neither is necessarily correct. But I've been in too many meetings where the issues were important, the speakers were compelled to make a full and compelling case, and a minority of participants were uninterested in these issues despite good reason to be.
It's sometimes a two way street. You think the meeting is a waste of your time? You wil
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Well, after a while you can easily tell which kind of meeting you're going into, simply by knowing who invites to it.
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Now you can be in meetings and have the narcissist who loves to hear himself talk drone on while still being able to do some meaningful work.
Not sure about liking to hear themselves talk, but I've noticed a LOT of people who call meetings of many people and don't participate. It's almost as if they don't have a job function at all . . .
Multi-tasking is a super no-no during meetings with us. Evolution equals survival - now can sit pin still while typing at normal speed.
"Meeting to review these results" (Score:2)
How many staff-hours will be spent in meetings discussing this and trying to figure out how to 'do meetings better'?
And how many of us have been in meetings to "discuss things" when it's clear the boss made a decision and then called a meeting to give the illusion of 'accepting input'?
Not useless (Score:2)
Stop hiding the cost then (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've long believed that managers should have meeting budgets. All they need to do is have Outlook automatically track meeting invites * length of meeting * a standard billing rate representing lost productivity, say $100/hr.
^^Please mod parent up - it's an insightful comment and a great idea that even the bean-counters can get behind. Anybody in an organization who is against such a plan is almost certainly just suckin' air anyway.
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Please mod parent up - it's an insightful comment and a great idea that even the bean-counters can get behind.
Even the bean counters? Most organizations would consider such a suggestion to be counting beans. But they probably should.
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Holy shit, a "sudden outbreak of common sense!"
Absolutely bloody brilliant suggestion.
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I recall working for a manager who did that (initially indirectly and then explicitly).
In his first week we had a meeting scheduled 15:30 - 16:00. The office windbag was in full flow. When the clock reached 16:00 the manager closed the meeting. Cries of "we haven't finished... we didn't discuss X,Y &Z" arose from some present, to which the reply of "You knew the meeting's time and purpose, you should work to it -- if you can't run a meeting on time, there's no chance of running a project on time!" and h
'Tis the age of Zoom... (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked from home the first year of the pandemic and while I'm back in the office now most days to complete those tasks which can't be done remotely, the majority of my team has remained remote. We just do everything with Zoom now and it's often quick and efficient. If we get a meeting where it's more of a presentation, we can just mute ourselves and throw it up on a second screen - only needing to pay attention to the portion of the meeting that impacts our team directly.
It's not like we miss anything, they almost always send out a meeting summary / minutes document after it's over so we can skim over the parts we weren't paying attention to.
The only three things I miss about working from home are the lack of commute, being able to work in my boxers and not much else, and being able to hook my laptop up to the big screen in my bedroom to watch presentations. Laying under the covers relaxing on my memory foam topped mattress with the individual pocket coils while watching the CEO drone on about something or other was hella fun, easy to focus on something pointless when you're comfortable; just make sure to set an alarm for after the meeting ends in case you fall asleep. ;-)
Don't take my meetings! (Score:2)
Meetings are the only breaks I get! I love meetings!
18h/week??? (Score:2)
18h/week in meetings???? I would chew off my leg to escape that job. I reckon I spend at most 90 minutes/week in meetings in my current job. Wow.
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18h/week in meetings???? I would chew off my leg to escape that job. I reckon I spend at most 90 minutes/week in meetings in my current job. Wow.
Your observation leads me to wonder about how well-defined "meeting" was in the study. If the figure includes unscheduled "three of us sat down to figure out this bug and decide how to roll out the fix" meetings then it's inflated, and there's no way of telling how badly.
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That depends what kind of meetings. You can also have a 2 person meeting and actually talk about a work related issue and try to figure out a solution for that. This is especially good when two people working on each end of the rope come together to figure out which part of the rope is faulty and how it should be fixed.
On the other end of the spectrum there are "wrong meetings". Meetings where you feel that you don't belong there. Information shared is not interesting to you and you have nothing you can giv
"Useless" is a slippery concept (Score:2)
I spent time in very productive meetings to bring about a not-needed, indeed-would-have-been-a-downgrade new system, a project that was eventually cancelled at the $8M mark, after 18 months of me endangering my career to oppose it. (Little satisfaction in being right; it used up the money I might have done a good project with).
Those were ALL useless meetings. What about Facebook meetings to avoid consequences for bad security, a policy that hurt customers then, and Facebook later, when they were found o
skewed data (Score:2)
Hell, yes, but more (Score:2)
Back in the mid-nineties, I worked for Ameritech (a Baby Bell). When we were going hot & heavy (we were a "startup division"), all the teams' senior technical resource had to go to a meeting EVERY SINGLE MORNING and report on their team... oh, and if the meetings lasted under an hour or an hour and a quarter, we'd joke about 'how short it was'.
Never mind all of us could have been doing actual work. Never mind that a senior contractor (we had a ton of contractors) told me that every management text said
We need a meeting ... (Score:4, Funny)
... to decide if we need less meetings.
Sadly, all too true. :-(
Dilbert lampooned [dilbert.com] the various meeting absurdities decades ago.
Yes Yes Yes! (Score:1)
There are too many windbags who are not reigned in, and those with more power tend to be windier. And most meetings would not be necessary if good collaboration software is used and people are trained to use it correctly. (MS-Teams is NOT good software, but common because MS bundles it for cheap.)
Standup meetings (Score:1)
Types of Meetings (Score:1)
Useless
Useless people waste time and 100 billion a year (Score:2)
On the perspectives of meetings (Score:2)
To many managers, being present at meetings is their job. It is what they *do*. It is the actual job. To sit in meetings and (presumably) make decisions.
While to the managed, meetings are overhead. It interferes with doing their actual job. They have routines, tasks, jobs, missions whatever. It is a fountain of plenty, and meetings either result in more of the stuff you already don't have time to do, or it is to benefit some other guy.
Meetings are important to some. But so, so much overhead. How many meetin
What do you mean "waste time"? (Score:2)
What do you mean "useless meetings waste time"? It sure does create a lot of jobs, drive up consumption and economy, boost GDP, and everyone is happy, no?
I've seen people whose sole job is to be in meeting, they have their calendar packed, from first hour to late evening, with meetings, and would never hesitate to set up lunch meetings (in the name of learning, of course) and late afternoon meetings, like at 5:00PM or 5:30PM and send invite to hundreds of people. Oh, and they look so busy, get accolade an
Just got email from our management about it (Score:2)
From: The CEO
Subject: useless meetings
Our highly paid management consulting company has identified useless meetings as one reason for the inefficiency. To identify and remove useless meetings the following meetings have been scheduled:
All C-Suite executives, one week, in Lake Taos.
All senior executives, one week in Hawaii.
All mid level executives, one week in Orlando
All employees, all hands meeting in the company cafeteria with burnt coffee and soggy bread, every Wednesday.
Meetings Are Like Vampires (Score:1)
real time info helps (Score:3)
Probably much more (Score:1)
Managers are the reason for meetings (Score:2)
Managers get a disproportionate amount of what they consider 'work' done in meetings, and therefore it's always the answer for them.
Oh great (Score:2)
I'm only half joking. Corporations are addicted to meetings. Managers need their fix.
No joke (Score:1)
I refused and complained to her boss. Never heard from her again and I got the project done on time with zero "project management".