Meetings Statistics: How Many Hours Do We Spend in Meetings?
One of the biggest complaints of modern work is that there are just too many meetings.
If you feel this way, you’re not alone. A study from Microsoft found that the amount of time workers spend in meetings has tripled since the onset of the pandemic. That coincides with a rise in hybrid and remote work, increasing the need to schedule face time with colleagues via virtual meetings.
“There are no more water cooler conversations, there are no more taps on the shoulder, people are just scheduling meetings for everything,” Aydin Mirazee, Fellow’s CEO, told CFRA’s Ottawa Now. “And when they’re scheduling those meetings they’re not scheduling them for five minutes — they’re scheduling them for full meeting block hours.”
Meetings are an important part of work — they’re where we get together to make decisions, brainstorm, and push projects forward. However, we also know that spending too many hours in unproductive meetings is a big distraction from deep focus time.
A survey of senior managers found that 65% said meetings hold them back from completing their own work and 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. As well, 64% said they had to sacrifice deep thinking for all those unproductive meetings.
There have even been terms coined to describe this phenomenon when it comes to video meetings — “meeting fatigue” or “Zoom fatigue.” A study by Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson found there are four key factors that make video meetings so draining:
- Excessive eye contact
- Watching yourself on camera for prolonged periods
- Being stuck in one place for too long
- A high cognitive load
There are certainly advantages to limiting time spent in meetings, but first, we need to establish a baseline and see how many hours per week we’re currently spending in meetings.
Fellow’s State of Meetings Report analyzed more than 30,000 companies’ meeting statistics to find out exactly how many hours we spend in meetings, as well as how factors like seniority or company size impact that time.
Read on for those insights as well as tips on how to limit unproductive and unnecessary meetings to reclaim your time.
Average time spent in meetings per week
Our data shows that across all regions and job titles, the average employee spends 11.3 hours in meetings each week.
That’s an aggregate number, based on the average percentage of the workweek spent in meetings, which is 28.3%.
There’s no hard rule to say how many meetings are too many meetings. For some roles, like those in Sales, taking meetings with prospects is their most important work — more of those meetings is a good thing. For someone like a Software Engineer, meetings can take away valuable coding time.
A 2023 survey from Slack found that, for most people, two hours per day of meetings is the most they can stand. That would translate to 10 hours per week or 25% of the workweek.
However, these numbers only tell part of the story. While 11.3 hours per week is the average, this number varies considerably across different company sizes and job titles. So next, we’ll take a deeper look at what can make this number different.
How seniority impacts time spent in meetings
There’s quite a difference between how many hours are spent in meetings per week when comparing seniority levels.
According to Fellow’s data, individual contributors have the lightest meeting load, with 20.2% of their workweek spent in meetings, or about 9 hours.
Managers and directors have similar meeting loads, at about 13 hours per week.
Those who are in the C-Suite or presidents or vice presidents actually come in the middle, with 28.3% of the workweek in meetings, or just over 11 hours.
It’s worth noting that this data comes from professionals who are already using Fellow — an AI note taker that assists with meeting management from prep right through to follow-up. Fellow’s features, such as agendas, meeting guidelines, an AI note taker assistant, and a recording library for asynchronous sharing make it easier to reduce meetings per week.
Those not using an AI note taker may find themselves spending more time in meetings, especially those with more seniority. For example, Harvard Business Review reported that executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours per week in meetings.
How company size impacts time spent in meetings
Our data shows that once a company reaches 1,000 or more employees, hours spent in meetings notably increase.
The average employee at large companies with at least 1,000+ employees spends an average of 12.8 hours per week in meetings, or 32% of the workweek.
Meanwhile, the average employee at both companies with 200 to 999 employees and companies with 10 to 199 employees spends about 10 hours per week in meetings.
There’s some logic to this — larger companies simply have more workers and more teams that need to work together. However, it’s also a reminder to keep a close eye on how much time employees are spending in meetings as a company scales up. If those meetings aren’t productive, it’s simply not an efficient use of time.
7 strategies to reduce time spent in meetings per week
If your meeting load has become unmanageable, there are ways to cut down on the hours you and your team are spending in meetings each week.
There are two approaches to this. First, find ways to eliminate unproductive meetings altogether. Second, take a deeper look at the meetings you’re having and increase efficiency to keep them shorter.
Here are 7 strategies that can help reduce the number of hours spent in meetings.
1. Eliminate unproductive meetings
Your first move should be to identify and eliminate the lowest-hanging fruit: unproductive meetings.
To identify if a meeting — especially a recurring meeting — is unproductive, ask yourself these questions:
- Are there clear meeting objectives?
- Are decisions being made?
- Are action items generated?
- Are useful meeting notes created?
- Does everyone get a chance to contribute?
If one or more of these questions are answered with a “no,” that’s a clear sign that the meeting has become inefficient. These are the meetings you should consider canceling and instead replace with asynchronous communication.
2. Always set an agenda
At Fellow, we believe every meeting should have a clear agenda — period. One of our mottos is: “No agenda, no attenda!”
Having an agenda keeps your meetings on-task and, when set in advance, gives attendees a chance to prepare for the meeting so that no time is wasted while people play catch-up. An agenda also reduces opportunities for the meeting to get off-track, because you can always refer back to it to steer the conversation.
With an agenda in place, you increase meeting efficiency, which in turn can make for shorter meetings. With Fellow, every meeting created in your calendar automatically generates a collaborative meeting agenda that attendees can contribute to ahead of time.
3. Make meetings async when possible
We often default to meetings as a way to share information or make decisions, but they’re not always necessary.
Remember that a meeting disrupts workers’ days and pulls them out of deep focus time. Rather, take a look at your upcoming meetings and consider which of them could simply be replaced with an email or message on Slack or Teams.
4. Setting no-meeting blocks or days
A proven strategy for reducing time spent in meetings is to block off certain times or days as no-meeting times.
At Fellow, for example, Wednesday is a no-meeting day. When someone tries to schedule a meeting on a Wednesday, they are prompted to consider changing it to another day with Fellow’s meeting guidelines feature. This feature allows companies to set custom rules for when meetings should and shouldn’t be booked.
These rules can be adapted for different teams. For example, customer-facing teams like customer success or sales need to be available, so the rule could just be no internal meetings on a particular day.
5. Make meetings shorter
According to Parkinson’s Law, people tend to fill whatever time is allotted for a particular task. That means team members will keep talking to fill a 30 or 60-minute meeting, even if it actually takes less time to accomplish the goals of a given meeting agenda.
With that in mind, resist the urge to default to 1-hour or even 30-minute meetings if the purpose of a meeting can actually be achieved in less time. A good place to start is with 25 minutes. According to Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Method, that’s the optimal time for retaining focus.
Reducing average meeting length will reduce how much time employees spend in meetings overall.
6. Keep meetings small
Even if you can’t eliminate a meeting, you can definitely reduce the number of people who need to attend, which reduces meeting hours for your colleagues.
When creating your invitation list, consider who can skip the meeting and be updated on the outcome afterward. A good rule of thumb is to invite no more than seven people to a meeting. According to research by Robert Sutton, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, eight people is the tipping point when meetings turn from productive to chaotic and unprepared.
With Fellow, you can record every meeting and generate a summary that includes a transcript, action items, and decisions made. Anyone who was not able to attend a meeting can quickly catch up on everything they missed by checking the recording library.
7. Send Copilot instead
In the same vein, rather than attending a meeting yourself, you can send an AI assistant instead. Fellow’s AI Copilot can attend a meeting on your behalf, recording, transcribing, and summarizing everything. All you have to do is review the post-meeting recap and you’ll be all caught up.
Copilot also comes in handy for reviewing any missed meetings after a vacation or sick day.
Track your meeting statistics and improve efficiency
Meeting productivity should be a top priority for any organization, and keeping track of how many hours employees spend in meetings is a key indicator.
Fellow’s features make it easy to improve meeting efficiency and reduce or eliminate unproductive meetings. Fellow even allows organizations to examine their own internal meeting statistics with analytics that include how many meetings start with agendas, hours spent in meetings, and when meeting notes are created.
Ditch ineffective meetings and optimize the meetings you do have to keep overall hours spent in meetings in check.
