Brits will spend 13 days in pointless meetings in 2019 costing the UK economy a ...

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A report has found companies waste billions of dollars in wasted hours as a result of forcing staff into pointless meetings.   

It found that, on average, a working professional spends around 13 total work days a year in meaningless meetings.

This, the report claims, will cost the UK economy £45billion in 2019 alone and is considered by employees to be more irritating than a stubbed toe, delayed commute, running out of toilet roll and getting caught in the rain without an umbrella.  

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Scheduling platform Doodle interviewed over 6,500 professionals across the UK, Germany, the USA and Switzerland, and examined 19 million meetings arranged through its platform in 2018.

It found more than a third (37 per cent) of professionals consider unnecessary meetings to be the biggest cost to their organisation and nearly half say they create confusion in the workplace and negatively impact their ability to actually do their work (43 and 44 per cent, respectively).   

Of all the time invested in meetings in the workplace, a third of people (33 per cent) revealed they felt unable to contribute to the wider group. 

Researchers did find that face-to-face meetings are still preferred to many other alternatives despite their flaws. 

Seventy-six per cent of professionals surveyed said it is their favoured format, with other methods scoring poorly. 

Conference calls were favoured by a mere seven per cent of people whereas video calls and instant messaging were favoured by only five and four per cent of the study participants.   

An overwhelming majority (95 per cent) also feel that an in-person meeting was an effective way of building relationships at work, with instant messaging scoring less than half of this (47 per cent).