Remote working is actually increasing the amount of time we spend in meetings
It’s making our workdays longer
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Whoever said remote working improved productivity clearly didn’t take marathonvideo conferencingcalls and numerous one-on-one meetings into consideration, as a new report claims remote workplaces actually result in increased meeting load and, as a consequence - longer working days.
Asynchronous collaboration andcommunicationmay be gaining popularity, but it results in workers struggling with more meetings. As there are fewer opportunities to reschedule them, employees are often forced to start the day earlier, and end it later, than usual.
The report from Reclaim.ai, an intelligent productivity and time blocking app forGoogleCalendar sampled aggregated and anonymized calendar app data, as well as polling more than 15,000 employees from different verticals. It found that workers now spend 25.3% more time inmeetingscompared to the pre-pandemic month of February 2020. Furthermore, the company found that employees now spend 308.8% more time in one-on-one meetings, as well.
Productivity killer
Unable to reschedule these meetings, employees are often forced to check in earlier, and stay at work for longer. As a result, the length of the average workday rose by 13.2%, from 8.95 hours, to 10.13 hours.
Reclaim.io claims one-on-one meetings are the “key driver” in the overall increase in meetings and longer workdays. As a percentage of weekly meetings, one-on-ones rose 226.3% compared to before the pandemic. Weekly meetings of this sort used to take up 1.4 hours a week, or 5.5% of the average meeting load in February 2020, but rose to 5.9 hours, or 17.8% in October 2021.
Furthermore, these meetings were rescheduled 42.4% of the time, and canceled 29.6% of the time.
“While moving events around on the calendar might seem like a simple task in the moment, it has a wide array of downstream impacts onproductivity, employee happiness, and retention,” said Patrick Lightbody, CEO and co-founder of Reclaim.ai.
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Boost your video call game with thebest headesets for conference callsaround
Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.
Best secure file transfer solution of 2024
Best lightweight Linux distro of 2024
What to do after a data breach?
