If you’re feeling bogged down at work by meetings, you definitely aren’t alone. New research indicates the volume of work meetings has grown in the years since the pandemic — overwhelming employees and costing companies millions.
An analysis by monitoring and analytics platform Vyopta shows that returning to the office did not reduce virtual meetings — even as in-office meetings more than doubled.
For the analysis, researchers evaluated more than 40 million meetings from 11 organizations, spanning more than 450,000 unique employees. The data included two six-week snapshots from Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 from remote or hybrid meetings facilitated by online platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex or Zoom. Fully in-person meetings were not considered.
As many organizations implemented return to office policies over the past two to three years, researchers expected to see a drop in virtual meeting volume — but that wasn’t the case.
The findings, published in the Harvard Business Review, indicate that workers attended an average …