5 Surprising Things We’ve Learned About Meetings This Year

You’ve probably seen (or remember) the meeting surge across businesses everywhere during and following the pandemic. Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams increased as workers flocked to these tools to transition to full-time remote work. Meetings increased significantly for many as teams attempted to stay connected outside of physical proximity.

By some standards, the dust around remote work has settled, but teams are still working on finding the best ways to work together. Is meeting culture permanently altered? What do meetings in the workplace look like today? How can we improve how today’s knowledge workers use meetings and how to make the most of them? 

We asked these questions after reviewing 12 months of meeting data (April 2023-2024) from hundreds of thousands of Clockwise users. By Clockwise’s definition, a “meeting” includes any calendar event with more than one person. This excludes out-of-office, asynchronous meetings, task blocks, and Focus Time. 

The results were shocking. Here’s what we learned about meetings in the workplace that might surprise you – for a full write up on our findings, scroll below the infographic. 

‍

1. Meetings get longer as the year goes on…

Interestingly, meeting length increases as the months pass, begging the question: Do we really need such long meetings?

Our data revealed that the average meeting length dropped steeply in January 2024 from December 2023 (New Year Calendar Cleanup, anyone?) but continued to climb month after month after that. And it’s not just one or two meetings increasing in duration. The aggregate of all meetings was 6% longer in May of this year over January, jumping from 39 minutes to 42 minutes. Three minutes might not seem like an enormous difference, but that adds up quickly for someone with a meeting-heavy schedule!

2. …and the higher up you are in an organization. 

If you’re calculating the minutes adding up throughout the year, there’s more you should know. Meetings are even longer for leaders (executives) than for individual contributors by a staggering amount. On average, the meetings executives attend are 12.3% longer than the average meeting length of those that individual contributors attend. 

In terms of minutes, meetings with individual contributors in attendance average shy of 40 minutes, whereas executive meetings average nearly 45 minutes. 

Add up those extra minutes for the entire calendar year, and that’s a lot of additional time spent in meetings. In a CEO study by Harvard Business Review (HBR), researchers discovered that the average leader in their sample attended 37 weekly meetings. Take 37 meetings multiplied by those five extra minutes; those executives have three more hours of meetings than the individual contributors in their organization.  

3. Distributed teams conduct longer meetings than centrally located ones. 

Meetings at distributed organizations (hybrid or full-time remote) are 4.7% longer than at centrally located companies, clocking in at just over 41 and 39 minutes, respectively. 

We speculate that part or all of the additional meeting time includes catching up and connecting before the meeting begins or what might feel similar to what some call the “water cooler” chats. 

4. Smaller companies have fewer but longer meetings than larger companies. 

In our data, a small company has 1-99 employees, and a larger company includes 500+ employees. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are 33% fewer weekly meetings per person at a smaller company than at a larger one. Smaller companies (up to 99 employees) average 12 meetings per person per week, and large companies (500+ employees) average just shy of 18 meetings per person per week.

What is surprising, though, is that while there are fewer meetings at small companies, they are 5.5% longer, averaging 42.5 minutes versus 40 minutes at larger companies. 

5. And finally, the total number of minutes spent in meetings per week is declining!

The total number of minutes spent in meetings per week has been gradually declining since 2022, a testament to teams everywhere experimenting to find the best way to work together in this landscape (which hopefully includes a combination of synchronous and asynchronous practices). 

For example, our data showed people spent 6.6% fewer minutes in the first four weeks of 2024 than in the first four weeks of 2023. To add, the total weekly time in meetings in the four weeks of October 2023 was 18% lower than that in 2022. 

At a glance, meeting culture evolves as our workplaces do. Stay tuned for more insights on the state of meetings from Clockwise, and in the meantime, check out these resources for improving meetings:

• Successfully Reduce Unnecessary Meetings with These Tips
• Create More Efficient Meetings and Reduce Wasted Time
• Find a Meeting Time that Works for All Attendees
• Effective Meeting Checklist
• Elevating Meetings: Keys to Making Every Meeting Important

‍