As more and more of our meetings moved online during the pandemic, there has been an understandable desire to understand just how effective they were. A recent survey from Cambridge Judge Business and School and the Vitality Research Institute found that online meetings really haven’t been all that effective.
The study, which was based on over 1,000 workers from the Vitality financial services group, found that the number of meetings grew by 7.4% between June 2020 and December 2021. This time spent in meetings is not time well spent, however, as the study found that the meetings are typically of low quality.
Low-quality meetings
Such meetings are defined in a number of ways. For instance, participants could be multitasking throughout it, or they could double-book them with other meetings or tasks. They might even have participants with overly similar roles, which increases duplication.
“Low-quality meetings often translate into less productivity and high levels of multitasking can increase stress,” the researchers explain.
The findings emerged after data was automatically collected via Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics tool. This data was then augmented by weekly surveys sent out to participants.
The researchers identified five key behaviors that they believed had the biggest impact on both our productivity at work and also our wellbeing:
- collaboration hours (meetings, calls, dealing with emails)
- low-quality meeting hours
- multitasking hours during meetings (including sending emails)
- “focus” hours (blocks of at least two hours with no meetings)
- workweek span (number of hours worked per week).
The work capacity of participants was captured according to their work energy, their anxiety and stress levels, their general satisfaction, and their work-life balance.
Less bang for our buck
“The relationships emerging from the data are clear: working longer (a higher workweek span), less productively (more low-quality meetings), and in arguably a more stressful manner (higher levels of multitasking) is associated with universally worse outcomes including a decline in work-life balance and quality of work,” the authors explain.
“More after-hours work predominantly affects one’s sense of work engagement but has no real impact on work productivity and quality. Increased focus hours affect work outcomes but not work engagement.”
The authors reason that while our transition towards remote and hybrid working over the past two years has been beneficial for some of us, it has certainly not been for all. They urge managers not to adopt a uniform approach to the matter that requires everyone to behave in the same way, whether that’s all coming in, all working remotely, or a combination of the two.
