Australian meetings slammed as ineffective 76% of the time

Meetings are being called out as ineffective 72% of the time.

Atlassian's The Workplace Woes: Meeting Edition report, based on a survey of 5,000 knowledge workers across four continents, including 1,000 in Australia, found that meetings prevent employees from finishing tasks on a normal day.

For Australia, 76% of respondents said meetings were an ineffective use of their time.

And 65% of the respondents also said they attended meetings that never stated the intended goal, while more than 45% said they had to work overtime at least a few days a week because meetings consume a lot of their work time, according to a report from the Information Age.

Ineffective meetings globally

Globally, three in four respondents said meetings were ineffective in brainstorming new ideas, as well as making decisions with others.

Source: Atlassian's The Workplace Woes: The Meeting Edition

The pushback against meetings come as 78% of the global respondents said they were expected to attend so many meetings to the point it got difficult to get work done.

"They aren't evil, they're just poorly done," the report read. "Our research revealed that the meeting culture at most organisations actually makes it harder for teams to reach their goals."

Some 62% of respondents also said they often attend meetings that don't state a goal in the invite, while 51% said they had to work overtime several days a week due to meeting overload.

Making meetings efficient

The findings come as recent reports revealed that organisations are losing from $2 million to more than $100 million every year thanks to unnecessary meetings.

According to the Atlassian report, it is important that leaders adopt the following better-meeting behaviours to make meetings more efficient for the workforce:

• Include a goal in the meeting invite
• Craft a meeting agenda beforehand
• Swap 30-minute meetings for 15 minutes
• Engage a meeting facilitator to make sure that a few voices aren't dominating the conversation
• Use a Meeting Notes template so people can contribute ideas ahead of time.

"It's especially important that you adopt these better-meeting behaviours," the report told leaders.

"You're often the ones organizing the meeting, and you have an outsized influence on culture. But you don't have to make all the changes all at once. Start with whatever feels manageable and build from there."