12 hours a week wasted on status meetings

Australian workers waste up to 30% of the working week preparing for and attending status meetings, according to a recent survey commissioned by Clarizen, provider of collaborative work management software.

The survey was conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Clarizen and tracked workplace trends including organisational structure and specific job responsibilities for 2200 employees aged 18 and above across the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

According to the results, preparing for status meetings often takes as long as the meetings themselves. 65% of Australian workers who participate in conference calls report that they multitask during these calls. Additionally, 89% of those who work with teams in multiple locations are frustrated, most often by communication issues such as keeping everyone in the loop (18%) and communicating with the team (18%).

The survey additionally found that:

“Over three years of studying status meetings in the US, the results have shown consistently that they substantially decrease the amount of time and energy workers can devote to completing actual, meaningful work and this appears to be so in Australia as well,” said Guy Shani, GM of Asia-Pacific and Japan, Clarizen.

“Solutions that drive productive, collaborative work can make a dramatic impact on the efficiency of teams by focusing meetings on strategy and planning vs boring status updates.”

• 67% of employed adults in Australia report they attend status meetings for updates on specific projects, spending 3.9 hours each week in these meetings
• 69% of Australian workers report attending ‘general purpose’ status meetings, devoting an average of 4.1 hours weekly in these meetings
• 65% of Australian workers spend time each week preparing for status meetings, spending an average of four hours weekly doing so
• 65% of Australian workers who participate in conference calls with colleagues admit to taking part in other work-related or personal tasks while on mute during conference calls including:
  • 29% respond to work emails
  • 18% eat lunch
  • 13% respond to personal emails
  • 14% use the restroom (on mute)