Cutting Down on Meetings Could Save Your Company $25,000 Per Employee Each Year

If you’ve ever heard your employees complain that “this meeting could have been an email,” you should listen. Spending too much time in a conference room or on a Zoom call could be costing your company.

Cutting down on unnecessary meetings could save your business an estimated $25,000 per employee each year. For a team of 100 people, that could amount to $2.5 million in annual savings. Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science management at University of North Carolina Charlotte, who was dubbed the “world’s leading expert in how to fix meetings” by author Adam Grant, calculated this price of wasted time in a new study conducted in collaboration with the transcription service Otter.ai.

The research, which surveyed 632 employees across 20 industries this summer, found that employees spend over a third of their time at work in meetings. During a typical week, professionals’ calendars were filled with 17.7 meetings, which lasted a total of 18 hours. Employees thought a third of these were unnecessary, and nearly half of workers surveyed felt that their calendar was too cluttered with unnecessary meetings.

Time spent in meetings increased as workers climbed the organizational ladder. Managers, which the study defined as having at least four direct reports, attended 6.9 more meetings that stretched 8.5 hours more each week. That time adds up. For every person on payroll, organizations invested an annual average of $80,000 in meetings. Rogelberg calculated the cost savings by using the employees’ median salaries and the hours they spent in meetings they thought could have been skipped.

As your team returns to the office or navigates a new remote-first normal, you may want to consider using this time to rethink past workplace habits. Reducing meetings not only provides an opportunity to reduce costs, but using your employees’ time more effectively can improve their productivity and mood.

Meetings will always be essential at times, but you could probably benefit from being more intentional about how and when you schedule them. It’s important to make sure the issue really warrants getting folks together to discuss it. Employees thought about a third of these team huddles could have been avoided as long as they were kept in the loop about any announcements or action items.

If you need to get the team together, keep the invite list as short as possible. Make sure each person knows what their designated role is, so they will not feel like their time is being wasted. The most common type of meeting people wanted to skip were the ones led by a person outside their department. When respondents were asked to share how they felt in those meetings where their presence was not needed, the top answers included annoyed, frustrated, and bored. If your team feels like this, they will not engage. During meetings where they felt superfluous, employees estimated they spent three-quarters of the time multitasking on other things and kept their audio or video turned off nearly half of the time.

Despite this, people still have trouble declining invitations to meetings–even to ones where they think they will have nothing to add. More than half (53 percent) of employees said they felt they had to attend all meetings regardless of whether their role was critical or not to the agenda. And while nine of 10 respondents agreed they could skip a meeting if they had a scheduled conflict or their manager informed them it was OK, only half felt they could decline because of their workload.