The professional everyday life is diverse, but there is a commonality across many industries that consumes time – more than you think: conferences.
What is it that holds us all back? Whether we talk about a conference, meeting, or discussion, it always means the same thing: a gathering of people during the workday to talk about work. And for several years now, we have all been spending more time on it every day than we did in previous decades. A study by Microsoft now shows how drastic the situation really is.
The peak of a regrettable trend
In the study, Microsoft compares data collected from 2020 with that of 2022. Here, there is an increase in time spent in meetings of 153 percent, meaning that what used to be one hour in 2020 has become two and a half hours in 2022.
However, the baseline in 2020 was already visibly high: According to a different study from the Harvard Business Review, employees were already spending dramatically more time in discussions around tables than in the 1990s, namely about 50 percent more.
We have reached the point of maximum human inefficiency.
Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Vice President for Artificial Intelligence and Work Trends
What is the reason? This can be excellently speculated and discussed about, but one reason, according to the researchers, is of course the pandemic. The increase in remote work/home office has led to the preservation of cohesion and, in order to coordinate, to more and longer meetings across the board.
However, the Covid-19 pandemic cannot solely be blamed, because, as mentioned above, there has been a clear increase in conference time since 2016 as well. One suspicion of the Microsoft scientists is that it has to do with a trend that has been observed for some time: companies themselves are to blame.
What has changed in companies since the early 2000s? Microsoft’s study suggests a link between the complexity of companies and the number of conferences being held. Different departments need to coordinate and/or agree separately on an increasing number of issues. The Wall Street Journal calls this the “coordination tax” that must be paid in the form of meeting time.
Jared Spataro further emphasizes that the involvement of employees in decision-making processes also leads to the creation of forums to hear their opinions.
A rather specific view of employee deployment is held by a Polish video game developer. The studio wants to limit remote work and have more people in the office. However, the wish has two catches: It applies to really everyone – even from abroad – and the office, according to internal sources, is not at all equipped for this desired influx.
