In large American companies, employees spend a third of their time in meetings. According to a French work psychologist, the trend is the same in France, and it has even strengthened since the Covid.
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18 hours per week spent on average in 17.7 meetings: this is the result achieved by a research professor from the University of North Carolina, in the United States. And it’s more for managers, who spend 22 hours out of 50 in meetings. Meetings whose employees confide that they could do without a third of them.
And all this has a tremendous cost: these unnecessary meetings represent a waste of approximately 25,000 dollars per year and per employee, or more than 100 million dollars in companies employing more than 5,000 employees. Problem: employees invited to meetings rarely dare, in 14% of cases, to decline these invitations and not participate in the superfluous meeting. For fear of offending the organizer or because they are afraid that their colleagues will judge them not to be invested in their work.
To find out if it was the same thing in France, we put the question to Christophe Nguyen, occupational psychologist, president of the firm Empreinte Humaine, who has worked a lot on the question. He confirms that half of the meetings are considered unnecessary, even if this is a figure that dates from 2017. And that since the health crisis, six out of ten workers have found that they have more meetings. Christophe Nguyen remarks that this leads many employees to find that they are unable to really advance in their work. And that these piling up meetings forced them to take their personal time to deal with substantive issues, to arrive at work earlier, to cut back on the lunch break. Hence the fatigue and frustration that accumulate.
Extended meetings that are sometimes a symptom of more serious problems. according to the occupational psychologist, too many meetings can be the marker of a company that does not grant enough autonomy to its employees. With a fear of error. Many people have to be warned to avoid being held responsible for a decision. Hence the piling up of meetings to which too many people are called, even if they have nothing to do with it…