Everyone Hates Meetings, So Why Do They Keep Multiplying? RTO Is One Culprit |
Everyone Hates Meetings, So Why Do They Keep Multiplying? RTO is One Culprit
Studies show some employees are spending more than 10 hours per week in meetings.
BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC
One sentiment shared by most workplace members — from CEOs down to recent entry-level hires — is disliking meetings, which are often considered as fruitless as they are relentless interruptions of productive work. But despite that common disdain, data shows the number of those business huddles continues to multiply, in many cases as a direct result of spreading reinforced return to office mandates (RTO).
Not illogically, one of the downsides of post-pandemic remote work permissions was an increase in the number of meetings held — often via video — that were required to reassemble team members to exchange ideas, plan projects, and update progress on those. But if employees hoped that having to spend more time back in the office with colleagues under tightened RTO rules would decrease the need and frequency of workplace gatherings, they are finding out the opposite is true.
Meetings continue to multiply, both for people working in the office or from home on remote days.
“The average person is now sitting in twice as many meetings per year” as tightened RTO mandates have spread, said workforce management company Hubstaff in its 2026 Global Benchmarks Report: Tracking How Work Gets Done report. “The typical organization is running almost six times as many meetings… (R)oughly a quarter of all tracked meeting time is during peak deep work hours. To make matters worse, nearly a third of that time is outside of standard business hours.”
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That study wasn’t the only one that found time spent in work meetings has continued rising.
Fellow, a company marketing meeting assistant technology, recently crunched its data to find the “average employee spends about 11.3 hours per week in meetings.” That time investment was slightly lower at small businesses, which averaged 10 weekly hours, but it rose to 12.8 hours at larger companies.Similarly, Workspace efficiency software specialist Archie recently reported that nearly half of all employees said they attend three or more meetings each day, with workers in certain jobs like sales averaging five daily hours in those huddles. If history is any guide, that time investment in the dreaded consultations will continue rising going forward.
“Over time, we’ve definitely gotten used to having more meetings,” the Archie blog post about the trend said. “Studies show the amount of time spent in meetings has grown by around 10 (percent) each year for the past 20 years. And thanks to hybrid and remote work, it’s easier than ever to hop on a call, so meetings have tripled since the start of the pandemic.”