SMEs lose more than 3,300 euros per year per employee due to ineffective meetings According to a new study by Sharp, do employees of French SMEs spend about 25 hours a month in meetings? What are the ways to achieve beneficial encounters?
It is no coincidence that the “Réuniologie” discipline was created in 2017. According to Louis Vareille in his book “The meeting is enough! » published by Editions Eyrolles, “aims to help organizations make each of their meetings a productive, engaging and learning moment. »
But why?
According to the International School of Reunionology website:
“Because meetings take up a lot of time in our lives, at work and elsewhere. Because meetings are the place for the collective to commit, generate ideas and make decisions. Because meetings allow the learning of many social and managerial skills. »
While leaders, managers and employees are running out of time, saying they are overwhelmed and stressed by work overload, the Sharp study leads us once again to reflect on the impact of meetings and their effectiveness and to ask how make them effective. .
According to Dr. Nigel Oseland, Occupational Psychologist “It is clear that ineffective meetings are not profitable and have a financial impact on companies. Work meetings are organized for multiple reasons, and to meet multiple objectives; therefore, employees must be able to count on different spaces and technologies according to their needs, instead of tirelessly using the same rooms and the same tools. »
And to prove him right, the results of this study are significant:
32% of employees admit to answering their overdue emails during meetings, while 29% of Gen Y and Z members admit to monitoring their social media. For this generation that is not separated from their smartphone and has become accustomed to working while answering their text messages, it can hardly surprise us but what they do is that the meeting has no contribution to their work and does not benefit from any challenge. to stimulate it.
But what do employees say about your meetings? Lack of variety and flexibility, eloquent reflections but that open certain avenues for improvement:
• more than 80% think they are more productive at their desk,
• two-thirds say that these meetings almost never lead to action or a concrete result
• and 56% think they are “boring”.
And they also add to destroy the effectiveness of meetings:
- 83% of French employees regret that all meetings adopt the same structure, whatever the topic,
- 66% regret that some meetings are held in inadequate rooms,
- 71% say meetings are often too formal.
It would seem that creativity and the stakes are hardly established: meeting time is gold. This evidence must be clearly notified.
And besides, they use tools from another era.
Technological tools made available to employees in meeting rooms are often inadequate or outdated: 26% of employees still work on paper and 35% present on flip charts or whiteboards.
All this leads us to think that before organizing a meeting it is time to ask yourself what your objective is and to question it: no specific objective, no meeting because the people consulted summarize the failures of their meetings:
- The lack of sharing information beforehand (30%),
- Do not invite only necessary participants (31%)
- The number of participants too high (26%).
Since meetings do not inspire employees, it is not surprising that employees prefer to spend their time on activities that they consider more productive and useful:
So what needs to be done?
According to Birgit Jackson, commercial director of Sharp Visual Solutions
“- ensuring that adequate information is shared,
– invite the right people,
– choose the right environment
-Use the right tools. »
That’s why Standing up meetings are so successful in start-ups… and use them as a model, why not?
* Study conducted on a representative sample of 1,017 French SME employees by the Censuswide Institute.
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