Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, probably knows a thing or two about meetings. One of his famous tips is that meetings should only have as many people as can be fed by two pizzas. Google's Eric Schmidt, meanwhile, says meetings should have a clear structure and purpose and only necessary people should attend.
A new piece of research by meetings tech company Doodle shows that other companies are not adopting these meeting rules. The State of Meetings Report 2019 estimates that companies around the globe waste more than half a billion dollars every year on pointless meetings. The costs include wasted business travel spend and executive time.
The financial cost of these meetings is broken down by country, as shown in the chart below:
The report is based on a study of 19 million meetings and commissioned interviews among more than 6,500 professionals in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and the USA.
Respondents to the survey also shared what they thought made a a bad meeting. The results are shown below:
- People taking phone calls or texting during meetings — 55%
- Participants interrupting each other — 50%
- People not listening to the contributions of others — 49%
- People arriving late or leaving early — 49%
- People talking about nothing for long periods of time — 46%
Despite this, the research found that 76% of professionals preferred face to face meetings to calls or video chats.
Gabriele Ottino, CEO of Doodle, said, "Everyone knows the pains of boring, pointless meetings. They happen every day, but the cumulative effect is frankly shocking! If you aren't looking to improve the efficiency of meetings at your organisation, you're wasting an enormous amount of money and time. Many organisations will suffer due to a casual approach to scheduling and running meetings, and in particular the 25% of professionals who have an average of five or more meetings per week."
So what should companies do?
Dr Sankalp Chaturvedi, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Leadership at Imperial College London comments on what makes a good meeting: "The secret of a successful and time-efficient meeting is preparation. The agenda mustn't be too long. Otherwise there's a risk of spending too much time on the first items and later items are rushed. The agenda should be circulated well in advance, including the goals of what is expected from the meeting, and specific detail on the subjects and time allocation."
The research shows that travel buyers and meetings managers should look more carefully at how meetings are planned and executed and reducing their number rather than simply trying to save money on the cost of the travel to all meetings.