Meetings Have Replaced Actual Work At White Collar Jobs — You Have To Log In After Hours To Get Anything Done
It's not good for productivity or work-life balance.
Andrey_Popov | Shutterstock If you feel like your workday is full of endless meetings, you're not alone. The shift toward remote work changed office communication and resulted in more meetings for many workers. In fact, according to a new report from The Atlantic, the average workday is now almost entirely composed of meetings — but other tasks still have to get done.
Many employees are forced to spend their personal time completing the work that meetings have pushed aside.
“When the pandemic sent knowledge workers home, official meetings replaced casual interactions and made it impossible for many people to get things done unless they found time to log back online after dinner,” Derek Thompson, a staff writer for The Atlantic, wrote.
As Thompson noted, informal conversations and low-key chats have been largely replaced by formal meetings that take much more time, yet are far less productive. However, while workers focus almost exclusively on meetings during the day, they are not actually assigned less work. Instead, their work eats into their personal time.
“About one-third of the workers in [a Microsoft study] were as likely to work at 10:00 p.m. as they were at 8:00 a.m.,” Thompson noted.
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This uptick in meetings is damaging to both work-life balance and productivity.
The deterioration of work-life balance is obvious. When employees can't finish their work during their 9-5, and log on later to finish up, they blur the line between work and their personal life.
However, less obviously, this trend is also damaging to the productivity of employees.
Microsoft vice president Jared Spataro told The Atlantic, “I think we’ve hit the high point of max human inefficiency in white-collar work. It sometimes seems as if the modern worker spends more time talking about work than actually working.”
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It's also not just the meetings that take up time and halt productivity. It's also the coordination to get everyone on the call and the time it takes to get back to work after the meeting — 25 minutes, on average, according to The Atlantic article.
Social media was quick to respond to the article from The Atlantic.
Thompson’s article was buzzworthy, to be sure. It quickly made the rounds on social media, where an entire Reddit thread was dedicated to discussing it.
"Ninety percent of meetings are a complete waste of everyone’s time," one user wrote. "Most of the people on those meetings are justifying their job by setting up these useless meetings."
“Meetings are mostly for the benefit of the person at the top of the pile within that meeting,” someone else argued.
One tweet has circulated online that falls perfectly in line with the theme of the article and the conversation surrounding it.
“My husband has been working from home for six weeks,” it reads. “I’ve learned that he basically gets paid to be in meetings. Speak in meetings, meet with other people about their last meeting, and have meetings to plan for the next meeting.”
While few would claim to truly enjoy meetings, it is surprising to note how much work has to be done at a later time because of them. Maybe it’s time to take a step back from meetings and focus on the work that actually needs to be done.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news and human interest topics.