Published on the 05/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Meetings are the bane of the workplace; the average worker attends five a week, an executive ten – and because of habitual late starts we lose several days of productive work time each year…
When Ovum asked just over 3900 employees about their experience with work meetings it found that 66 percent reported that “they get little or no value out of most of the meetings they attend”. Paradoxically almost one in three workers report that the number of meetings they are asked to attend is on the rise.
The survey, which also canvassed the opinions of 1170 workers in Asia Pacific, found that most meetings also ran late, costing executives three hours a week in lost time and productivity. That adds up to more than five days a year.
The survey, which was sponsored by LogMeIn, a company that provides technology and services to support remote secure access to work computers from a smartphone or over the internet, revealed that despite this lost productivity there was still relatively little appetite for virtual meetings. Only 24 percent of meetings are virtual, with people dialing in or using web conferencing technology to hook up with colleagues, although that figure rises to 36 percent among the 26-35 year old demographic.
Only a third of respondents report using any form of web-based meeting collaboration platform to share documents, and videoconferencing is making very slow inroads in meeting culture.
Despite this rather dismal situation fewer than two in five respondents said their organisation was looking for new web collaboration tools that might help improve meeting outcomes, although the figure was substantially higher (73 percent) in companies with 500 or more employees.
