The modern office is not the same as or equal to NASA Mission Control during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. As much as we’d all like to think failure is not an option, the research says otherwise. And those failures come at a cost.
In late July, the Jabra Research Institute published “The Cost of Bad Meetings,” which shared findings from a study of 2,671 knowledge workers from seven different countries. You can review the methodology to see how Jabra calculated the numbers, but the company estimated that bad meeting culture carries a price tag of more than $130 million per year for enterprise businesses.
It’s not like those wasted dollars are monetized by tossing $20 in the company swear jar every time there’s a %$#@! meeting issue. No, these are hidden costs that you won’t find on the books. They come from “wasted time, technology failures, and the downstream work that bad meetings generate.” Jabra calls this “meeting debt,” and the numbers aren’t good.
Let’s check out some of the damning bullet points:
• Workers are averaging a full working day in meetings every week (only 7.7 hours in the United States, a small win). The larger the company, the more time in meetings. Workers consider almost 60% of time spent in meetings unnecessary.
• About 87% of workers dread meetings, and more than 90% of those workers leave meetings without clear action items. And that lack of direction leads to—you guessed it—a follow-up meeting. Cue vicious cycle.
• Roughly half of remote workers feel excluded or talked over, with more women reporting worse experiences than men. Plus, remote workers who feel talked over are much more likely to dread meetings.
Those are some pretty high corporate culture hurdles to clear. But technology isn’t without fault, either. Virtual collaboration may be the norm for today’s meetings, but respondents said three out of four meetings experience at least one tech failure. Hybrid meetings can be particularly problematic.
“Meeting failure is not random,” Jabra declared. “It is patterned, predictable, and overwhelmingly concentrated in the same places, the same formats, and the same broken conditions, meeting after meeting, week after week.” Ouch, tell me how you really feel.
What’s wrong? Mic problems are at the top of the list, no matter the size of the meeting room—and the larger the room, the more time is lost to tech failures. Jabra’s research concluded that 37% of meetings start late, and every meeting loses almost 11 minutes on average to technological failures. Video is abandoned in 30% of meetings, and 21% of meetings are moved during the actual meeting to another room. All those problems and the corresponding workarounds to get those meetings back on track are really only successful in creating more dread.
Perhaps the most puzzling takeaway is that organizations just sort of accept it. The sky is blue, the trees are green, your meeting is going to start late, and there will be technical issues. Inefficiency is the norm, and because no one “owns” the conference room, the problems don’t seem to get fixed. Jabra calls it the “invisible broken room.” It’s a great term, though I wish it was a term that didn’t have to exist.
AI isn’t leaving unscathed, either. The good news is that AI meeting tools had been tried by 75% of the respondents for tasks like post-meeting summaries, follow-up emails, live transcription, and auto action items. The bad news is that less than 33% use them regularly. What’s the disconnect? The top barrier is accuracy/trust (42%), with privacy/compliance not far behind (39%).
Yes, companies of all sizes need to reevaluate meetings. What are they being used for? Could the meeting objectives be better met through an email, DM, or team chat? But correcting corporate communication patterns only takes you so far. When a meeting is necessary, we need to make sure the technology isn’t making the experience dreadful.
