A New Study Finds a Third of Meetings Are Useless. Elon Musk Has the Solution

It’s hardly news that everyone thinks meetings are out of control. I’ve been writing stories covering reports and expert commentary saying the same thing over and over again for nearly a decade. But despite all this hand-wringing the problem continues. In fact, according to some studies it seems to be getting worse.  

By replacing ad hoc, informal chats with scheduled online conversations, the pandemic actually increased the total time most professionals spend in meetings. How much of that 20 or so hours a week or so (depending on which study you believe) is actually productive? 

A new study by automated transcription service Otter.ai and University of North Carolina psychologist Steven Rogelberg came to a depressing conclusion. Surveying more than 600 employees across a broad range of industries they found that workers judge a full third of meetings to be completely unnecessary. 

Wasting a third of your workday listening to someone on drone about irrelevant topics is of course super frustrating for employees. But the Otter.ai study underlines just how ridiculous this situation should be from the perspective of companies and their leaders. 

“Companies pay an average of $80K per professional employee to attend meetings each year and $25K (31%) is to attend meetings deemed ‘unnecessary,'” the study concludes. Can you think of something more worthwhile to do with $25,000 dollars a year per employee? I’m guessing the answer is yes, which makes it even more shocking that the research also found a full 78 percent of managers have never addressed the issue with employees. 

Otter.ai helps companies automatically transcribe meetings so employees can not attend them and just read about what happened later, so this research is obviously self-interested. But it also jives with a ton of other studies, including previous work by Rogelberg, that show the same thing – the exact figures might differ slightly but all of them agree that a ridiculous amount of time is wasted on pointless meetings.  

If managers have been warned about this problem ad nauseum, why can’t they solve it? Otter’s research the answer basically boils down to company culture. “Most employees cite ‘organizational norms’ and the lack of conversation around when meetings can be skipped as the main reason why they feel the need to attend meetings, even if they deem their attendance as unnecessary,” reports the company. Basically, workers worry they’ll look bad or offend people if they say no to a pointless meeting. 

Which is why managers who actually want to do something meaningful about this problem might want to take a page out of Elon Musk’s playbook and address the underlying issue with norms and how politeness at work gets defined head on. 

“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time,” Musk reportedly told Tesla employees. By setting the tone from the top, Musk makes it socially acceptable to politely decline a meeting than it is to sit there fidgeting for an hour when you could be doing something far more productive. 

While it’s hard to argue with Musk’s direct approach to tackling the root cause of pointless meetings, there is another research backed solution you might want to try as well. A recent study by a team of business school professors found that banning meetings four days a week boosted productivity at work 74 percent. If four days a week is too radical for you, consider banning them just two days a week. That boosts productivity 71 percent.