If this spring is (again) about allergies, it’s been a few years since office work has been gripped by meeting fever. Observers have even called this phenomenon “reunionitis”. The time spent in meetings may have fallen by 30% since the information recorded in 2021, but employees still spend more than 14 hours per week there, according to the site Reclaim. ia. The champions in this area would be engineers (16.8 hours) and salespeople (16.5 hours), far ahead of marketing (11.9 hours) or support functions (12.4 hours). Little surprise from HR (2 p.m.), who are quite good in the end!
A climax in the Covid era
The peak of this orgy of groupings, face-to-face or dematerialized, could be observed in 2020: during the Covid crisis, companies constantly called for the Google Meet meeting, the Zoom call or even the conference Discord. Despite the decline observed in the space of three years, this situation continues to annoy employees exhausted by extended briefings and debriefings. Reading the Reclaim report. ia, we learn that this feeling does not weaken because “we have moved to a more hybrid form of work where teams oscillate between face-to-face and remote work, but that they exchange much more spontaneously, face-to-face, than ‘in 2021’. A 30-minute point stuck in a Google Calendar is no easy task.
Significant weariness and cost
But it costs money. The American study gives the average cost of a year of meetings for an employee: 29,129 dollars, or nearly 27,155 euros. An amount to put into perspective when we know the average annual salary in the United States in 2023 for a full-time employee: 59,428 dollars, a little over 55,000 euros, while we are around 41,000 in France. These moments of exchange may be essential, but they should not last longer than necessary. Paradoxically, the document points to an increase in meetings since the reference year 2021. At the time, they lasted on average 50.6 minutes. Now, the 52-minute mark is not far from being crossed. Employees would therefore have fewer meetings per week (17) but would spend more time on them. It makes you think. Shall we schedule a meeting to talk about it all together?