ManageElite Discovers why Management Hates Meetings

ManageElite, in its survey of 948 C-suite executives, directors, managers, and supervisors, has highlighted the inefficiency of upper management to run effective meetings and convey their organizations’ mission to their employees. Specifically:

• 44.8 percent of executives and managers said that meetings they attended accomplish nothing;

• 90.4 percent of respondents said that when they ran meetings, they were efficiently run;

• 34.8 percent reported the opposite, that meetings were run efficiently when others chair them;

• 8.9 percent of executives and managers said something was actually accomplished in the most recent set of 10 meetings they had attended.

Survey participants also reported on the biggest obstacles blocking productivity and efficiency in meetings: 44.7 percent reported protectionist behaviors in meetings designed to protect the interests of select individuals; 38.3 percent reported the biggest obstacle was the domination of meetings by only one or two people; 34.6 percent reported defensiveness, 31.7 percent blamed internal office politics, and 30.9 percent said it’s a matter of people being unprepared.

Most respondents (61.6 percent) felt that they attended an appropriate amount of meetings but nearly one quarter (22.4 percent) said they attended too many meetings. The remainder of respondents (16 percent) reported not attending enough meetings. Some additional results from the survey include: 61.1 percent of upper management report meetings lasting an hour or more; the average number of people attending meetings was about seven; almost 40 percent of meetings were reported to not begin or end on time.