Where the rubber never meets the road: Online workplace meetings

Time to schedule a meeting about one of the biggest issues affecting the workplace? Don’t go there.

Productivity is suffering at the hands of “inefficient” meetings, according to a workplace report issued by Microsoft on Tuesday.

The software company found that since February 2020, people are in three times more Microsoft Teams meetings and calls per week at work, a 192% increase since the start of the pandemic. The heaviest Teams users are spending close to eight hours, or an entire workday, each week in online meetings, according to the survey of 31,000 workers, conducted between February and March 2023.

The effect is staggering: two-thirds of workers struggle to get work accomplished because of long meetings.

But are the meetings effective? (Cue toilet flush.) More than half of people (58%) said it’s difficult to brainstorm in a virtual meeting or catch up if they joined a meeting late (57%), and that the action items following a meeting are often unclear (55%).