Ineffective meetings: up to 22 days lost per year

Ineffective meetings: millions of euros lost?

22 days. This is the time that a French employee would lose on average each year due to useless or poorly prepared meetings. This is what Jabra’s latest study reveals.

Surprising thing: the French spend less time in meetings than most of their neighbors. Around 6 hours per week, compared to 8 hours in the rest of the world. And yet, 63% of them consider these meetings unnecessary. So it’s not a question of volume, it’s a question of quality.

Le problème concret ? 59% of meetings in France result in nothing clear. No decision, no defined action. Just… another meeting to review the previous meeting. Jabra calls it a “meeting habit”: the more you organize, the more you generate. The classic vicious circle.

But perhaps what is most striking is the human impact. 84% of French employees say they feel apprehensive before a meeting.

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“Until now, unnecessary or ineffective meetings were seen as a simple annoyance and not as a financial risk. However, if employees feel apprehensive as a meeting approaches, this already represents a cost for companies.â€

Jean-Baptiste Pain, President Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Caribbean and Latin America at Jabra.

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What these ineffective meetings really cost

For a company of 5,000 employees, productivity losses linked to unnecessary meetings exceed 86 million euros per year. Adding technical problems, this amount comes close to 90 million.

Technical issues are a separate topic. More than a quarter of meetings today mix people in person and others working remotely. And 72% of these hybrid meetings encounter hiccups (sizzling sound, cutting video, capricious connection).

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Result: more than 12 minutes lost each time. Throughout the year, this represents nearly three days of work per employee.

There is also a less often mentioned angle: inclusion. More than half of remote participants feel ignored or put aside during exchanges.

And women seem particularly affected: 20% of them say they feel less visible or less heard in these hybrid formats.

How to reduce ineffective meetings and improve productivity?

Hybrid meetings therefore constitute a major challenge today. More than a quarter of meetings bring together employees present on site and others remotely.

Over the course of a year, technical disruptions represent nearly three days of work lost per employee. For a company of 5,000 people, this represents around 5 million euros of shortfall.

However, HR has several levers of action. Each meeting must have a clear objective, a precise agenda and a limited time. Participants must also be selected according to their real contribution to the subject matter.

The quality of equipment is also becoming a strategic issue. The study shows that the absence of video increases the risk of having to organize follow-up discussions by 33%. It also increases by 29% the risk that no concrete decision will be taken at the end of the meeting.

Artificial intelligence can also help. Three out of four employees have already used AI tools to transcribe or summarize meetings. However, less than a third use them regularly.

For HR, the priority therefore remains the same: reduce the number of meetings without added value, better prepare discussions and guarantee that each participant can be heard. It is at this price that companies will be able to recover several days of productivity per employee each year.

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