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Canadian workers are spending nearly a fifth of their workweek attending meetings, according to a new report by note-taking software company Fellow. The number of meeting hours increases for more senior roles, reaching 36 per cent for Canada's C-suite leaders.
Time spent in meetings varies by geographical location, based on work culture norms in different countries, the report said.
For example, workers across all seniority levels in the United States appear to spend the highest percentage of their time in meetings, compared to workers in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Europe. U.S. workers spend at least 20 per cent of their week in meetings, and that number rises to 35 per cent for senior leaders.
Meanwhile, no worker at any seniority level in Australia is spending more than 30 per cent of their week in meetings.
Business size also has an impact on meeting load. As a company grows, so does the need to convene, along with the time spent doing so. The more teams and more people there are, the more often they meet to keep information flowing and facilitate decision making.
Fellow found that once an organization has more than 200 employees, individual contributors start to spend 20 per cent of their time in meetings. The biggest time demands are seen when a company scales beyond 1,000 employees. VP and C-suite leaders find their meeting load more than doubles as a company grows.
Meeting time has been on the rise for several years now, starting with the pandemic, as work models shifted to remote and hybrid. A 2023 study by Microsoft Corp. found that time spent in meetings has tripled since then.
Another survey, released by the software as service (SaaS) company Atlassian, found that 78 per cent of workers say they’re expected to attend too many meetings. The report called meetings "the number one barrier to productivity."
The same survey found that just over half of workers said they had to work overtime to make up for hours lost to meetings — and that number rises to 67 per cent for those at a director level or higher.
"We also know that meeting overload is detrimental to both morale and productivity," Fellow's report said, adding that those meetings aren’t necessarily producing better organizational results.
Other surveys have found that 65 per cent of senior managers say meetings keep them from completing their own work and 71 per cent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Most also said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.
Fellow said that across all organization sizes, Tuesdays are the most popular day for meetings, followed by Thursday and then Wednesday. This leaves little time for execution and deep work on those days, they said.
Workers in quality assurance department spend the highest number of hours in internal meetings, followed by human resources, where meetings are also a key part of the job.
For the report, Fellow pulled data from more than 30,000 organizations.
— Denise Paglinawan, Financial Post