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Attend a business meeting or watch paint dry: what almost half of us chose

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Almost half of business people polled recently indicated that they would prefer to watch paint dry, or visit a motor registry office, rather than attend one of their company’s status meetings.

Clearly the survey results show that status meetings undermine worker productivity with lengthy preparation requirements and distracted, multi-tasking participants.

Three in five employed adults reported that preparing for a status meeting “takes longer than the meeting itself,” while more than one-third of those who attend status meetings called them a waste of their time.

The global survey was conducted by Clarizen earlier in 2015. Compared to a similar Clarizen/Harris Poll survey conducted in 2011, the latest results show that business people spend an average of 4.6 hours each week preparing for status meetings and 4.5 hours attending general status meetings – up from four hours each week four years ago.

Anything but a meeting, please!

The recent poll results also indicate that almost three in five workers multitask during status meetings. Almost half of respondents would rather “do any unpleasant activity”, including watching paint dry, than sit in a status meeting.

A status meeting is defined as a meeting with updates for team members on completed and active work tasks. Strategy, brainstorming and company planning meetings were not included in this definition of a status meeting.

“Survey results continue to confirm that status meetings do not boost employee productivity,” said Avinoam Nowogrodski, the founder and CEO of Clarizen.

“In today’s modern workplace, where demands are constantly changing, employees need easy, real-time access to their discussions, work content and processes.

“This is what fuels employee productivity and quality work, not sitting in status meetings or preparing lengthy status reports. Select vendor solutions can enable company-wide collaboration, accountability and transparency, meaning workers spend less time in meetings and more time completing actual, meaningful work.”

meetingsAdditional survey findings

  • 60 per cent of status meeting attendees reported that preparing for a status meeting takes longer than the meeting itself.
  • 46 per cent of employed business people would rather do any unpleasant activity than sit in a status meeting, with 17 per cent choosing to watch paint dry.
  • 35 per cent of status meeting attendees called status meetings “a waste of my time.”

The survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Clarizen among 2,066 adults aged 18 and older.

Clarizen offers an alternative to status meetings, combining true social engagement with powerful project management to redefine enterprise collaboration.

The vendor delivers on its vision of the work graph – organically connecting social context, tasks and projects on a single cloud-based platform – to enable collaboration that drives results.

Fast to deploy and easy to use, Clarizen is redefining enterprise collaboration by connecting social context with tasks and projects to drive increased productivity and profitability.

Clarizen fuels the high-performance teams of more than 2,300 organisations across 76 countries, including Australia and New Zealand and dozens of the Fortune 500 companies use its solutions.