Employees are losing approximately 19 hours each and every year due to late meetings, according to Barco‘s research conducted across organisations in the UK, US, France and Germany on meeting stress.
Of the 1,000 office workers surveyed, 59 per cent attend meetings a few times a week, with meetings beginning, on average, six minutes late. If each worker attends four meetings per week, that equates to 864 minutes lost each year. Extrapolating that for a workforce of 50, and that is a total of 950 hours wasted every year — a figure of particular significance to businesses with billable hours.
The main causes of this lateness are due to struggling with technology (31 per cent) and problems with adaptors (16 per cent).
Overall the research also shows that the causes of the most meeting stress (87 per cent) are technology related, with connecting to the meeting room technology, incompatibility issues, and technology failure some of the leading issues.
‘Meetings should encourage participation, collaboration and engagement,’ says Lieven Bertier head of product management, ClickShare, Barco.
Bertier continues, ‘However, what our research is showing is that time is being lost largely due to technology issues, which means the flow of meetings is affected, people aren’t necessarily able to present the content they need to and, as a result, collaboration and interactivity are badly affected. And it’s not just limited to the meeting. The research reveals a far wider impact.’
In addition to late meetings, 93 per cent of respondents said they had experienced wider consequences of technology-related meeting stress. 70 per cent said speakers lost credibility, 24 per cent said they missed a deadline as a result, and 12 per cent indicated they had even lost out on business opportunities.
Further reading on business meetings
