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Small Business News
UK workers waste five hours a week arranging meetings
Meeting inefficiencies cost UK businesses almost GBP4,000 per manager each year and more than half the working week. UK managers and administrative assistants burn an eighth of their working week arranging meetings and conference calls according to research released today. Doodle, the leading Web 2.0 scheduling tool and author of the survey, believes workers could “reclaim Friday afternoon” and companies can save costs by working smarter when arranging meetings. The survey was released today on Administrative Professionals' Day.
Doodle estimates that the time spent arranging meetings each year equates to £3,932* of an average manager’s salary and £1,886* of an administrative professional’s, illustrating the cost to business of ‘traditional’ ways of scheduling meetings. On average, professionals spend five hours arranging times to hold seven meetings per week. UK managers spend more time than administrative staff arranging meetings. And yet one in every six meetings is rearranged, Doodle found.
With more than 4.3 million managers in the UK* this equates to a total annual economic cost to the UK of £16.3 billion per annum in spent managerial wages. The pan-European and US survey of 2,500 professionals found the most common ways to organise meetings are via classic calendar systems (32 per cent), email (31 per cent) and by phone (22 per cent). With each having four to five participants, this helps explain why three quarters of all professionals spend almost five hours each week - more than half a working day - just arranging them, Doodle's CEO Michael Näf says.
“People are still sending endless calendar notes and emails to and fro to arrange business meetings. Because each meeting has between four to five attendees the 'reply all' email threads can spiral out of control, and we've proven here it's a big burden on business efficiency,” Näf said. “We could take a half day off every Friday with the time saved on meeting arrangement by using simple online tools that do it much quicker and more reliable. This problem contributes in part to the UK’s long working hours culture** which lost UK workers £26.9 billion in wages last year.”
Doodle is a simple-to-use, free online tool that helps organisations and individuals save time organising meetings by offering a transparent view of everyone’s preferred choices. It closes the gap between the main calendar systems on multiple platforms, including Microsoft Outlook and mobile platforms, and also the trusted paper agenda, Näf added.
Doodle found that face-to-face meetings account for just a quarter (25 percent) of all business get-togethers, with conference calls (35 per cent) and web meetings (30 percent) taking preference. Three-quarters of all meetings involve not just internal employees but external colleagues as well, typically scheduled without shared calendar systems.
The UK's meeting arrangement habits are largely reflected across European countries and the US, and typically managers and assistants arrange similar numbers of meetings. Only France appears to differ, with meetings typically being arranged more by secretarial staff than by managers. The French also have more meetings than other leading economies with 70 per cent of French respondents arranging more than seven meetings per week.
"The study suggests that while the ways of doing business have evolved, professionals tend to revert to email for everything - even for things that can be done more simply online," Näf continued.
The key findings from the survey:
- UK employees organise seven meetings a week on average, with the mean length of each being two hours 45 minutes.
- Most meetings have at least four or five participants, meaning four- and five-way ‘reply-all’ email strings to arrange them – this is a lot of emails if firms don’t use online scheduling tools
- Across Europe and the US administrative staff use calendar systems
- (34 per cent) more than managers (27 per cent). Meanwhile managers prefer email (34 per cent) to arrange meetings over administrative staff (30 percent)
- Managers typically need to rearrange more meetings than their assistants, with 69 per cent of managers needing to reschedule get-togethers compared to under half (46 per cent) of PAs
- UK managers are arranging more meetings than personal assistants.
- With average salaries being higher the cost of time wasted between is even more costly to organisations’ bottom line
You can read the full report here:
http://doodle.com/about/mediareleases/survey.html
by: Editor
22nd Apr 2009
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