The figures speak for themselves: office workers spend an average of 14.8 hours a week in meetings, according to a report from US firm Reclaim.ai, based on a survey of 1,300 workers. This represents a 31.2% reduction from the 21.5 hours of weekly meetings recorded in 2021.

This reduced amount of time spent in meetings may seem surprising given that employees frequently complain of being swamped by conference calls, briefings and other forms of collective discussions. A term has even been coined to describe this workplace overdose: “meetingitis“.

Meetingitis reached its peak during the pandemic: managers used and abused video conferencing to keep everyone connected and engaged, much to the chagrin of staff, who were exhausted by the succession of online meetings.

“While remote work is still highly prevalent, we’ve really shifted to more of a hybrid workforce where teams are still operating across in-person and remote environments, but are again having more in-person spontaneous discussions than we were in 2021,” reads the Reclaim.ai report.

While workers are devoting fewer hours in meetings than they did a few years ago, they still spend 37% of their time in such gatherings, or (more or less) discreetly checking their phones in the hope that no one will take them to task. That equates to 17.1 meetings a week, across all job categories.

Curiously, meetings have been getting longer since 2021, when they lasted an average of 50.6 minutes; now they’re closer to 52 minutes. But given that not everyone has such a long attention span, it may be wise for companies to make them shorter and, by extension, more productive.

This is made all the more pressing by the fact that every meeting has a cost: Reclaim.ai estimates that the time each employee spends with colleagues costs their employer US$29,129 annually per person.

This has prompted certain companies to develop tools that measure the financial cost of a work meeting – the aim being to optimise costs, rather than altogether abolish meetings, which are still an essential part of office life. Happy Labour Day!