If it feels like you’ve been spending more of your workday stuck in meetings, you might be right, according to a new report from Ottawa-based tech company Fellow.
“We’ve seen as much as a 50-per-cent increase in terms of the amount of time people are spending in meetings,” CEO Aydin Mirzaee told OBJ this week.
The report from Fellow analyzes data collected from clients who use the company’s AI meeting software for tasks such as taking notes, summarizing information, and tracking action items.
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Mirzaee said the company launched in 2019, just months before businesses everywhere switched to video meetings during the pandemic. The ensuing influx of demand for meeting assistants helped Fellow scale internationally to include small and medium-sized enterprises as clients, as well as big players like Shopify and Hubspot.
While Mirzaee believes some form of hybrid work is here to stay, he said research like this helps his company adapt to changing client needs.
“We consider ourselves the meeting people,” he said. “We study meetings and we build software and products for meetings. If we want to build the best products, we have to really understand how people meet and how that changes over the course of time.”
Analysis of the data revealed a number of intriguing tidbits for Mirzaee. For example, the middle of the week is the busiest time for booking a meeting, with Tuesday as the most popular day. Mondays and Fridays, by contrast, see a drop in activity.
But the data also showed that the bigger the company, the more time spent in meetings. In companies with 1,000 or more employees, managers and directors are spending nearly half their work week in meetings. By comparison, companies of 10 to 199 employees spend about one-third of their time in meetings.
While Mirzaee said more meetings isn’t always a bad thing, especially for departments that spend a lot of time interacting with clients, internal meetings are often inefficient, especially for larger companies, where meetings can have too many participants and last too long.
“The thing to note is the size of meetings,” he said. “If your company is more than 1,000 people, 22 per cent of those meetings have more than eight attendees, whereas if your company is less than 200 people, it’s only 15 per cent.”
The report found that 28 per cent of meetings are also longer than 30 minutes. According to Mirzaee, the number of attendees and the length of the meeting tend to play off of each other, creating an environment where fewer people participate and pay attention and decision-making abilities are significantly hindered.
“It’s this concept called ‘social loafing,’” he said. “The more people there are in a meeting, the less likely they are to contribute their fullest. Whereas if the meeting is only three people, you can imagine that those three people are probably more efficient.”
Being in-person in the office is likely to reduce the number of formal meetings that workers take, according to Mirzaee. However, working in an office leads to impromptu moments such as stops at a colleague’s desk and chats around the water cooler. So, while there are fewer pre-arranged gatherings, the commitment is the same.
“Being in-person can reduce the number of meetings but it doesn’t necessarily reduce the ‘collaboration tax,’” said Mirzaee. “There is a lot to be said about those taps on the shoulder. There’s research to show that every time you get distracted from your flow state, it takes you 20 minutes to get back into it.”
AI meeting assistants on the rise, even in-person
While the amount of time spent in meetings has gone up, so too has the use of AI.
While that’s not unexpected in a remote world, Mirzaee said, he’s also expecting the technology to stick around in the hybrid model as more meetings take place face-to-face.
While the technology can be set up on a mobile device to record and transcribe in a boardroom, Mirzaee said it can also allow workers at all levels to reduce the number of meetings they need to attend by supplying notes after the fact.
“People don’t say no (to meetings),” he said. “There’s this fear of missing out. This is something we hear all the time. But if you have an AI assistant attending your meetings, grabbing the action items and being able to summarize it for you, it would be silly for you to go in where you’re not going to be actively participating.”
AI is a tool that he thinks will be useful in helping larger companies reach the ideal meeting state: eight participants or less, booked at least 24 hours in advance, and no more than 30 minutes, as well as a clear agenda beforehand and a list of action items after.
“Our prediction is that, over time, the size of meetings will be reduced and we also think the number (of meetings) will also be reduced,” he said. “Basically, the pandemic increased the number of meetings and we think, with the advent of AI, we’re going to bring that down to even less than pre-pandemic levels.”
