192% rise | We're having more meetings than ever - are they a waste of time?

Meetings at work are important for a variety of reasons.

They allow communication across a team and across different departments, they create a space that enables decision making and problem solving, they allow managers to give feedback to their team, and it’s a valuable time for co-workers to communicate and bond.

However, meetings have come under the microscope recently as a potentially wasteful way to spend the working day, particularly as businesses fight to become more productive.

In recent research from Microsoft, the company found that workers are in three times the number of Teams meetings and calls per week compared to before the pandemic, a significant 192% increase. For those who spend the most amount of time in meetings, those users were spending nearly eight hours a week, an entire day of work, in online meetings alone.