Most employees dread their meetings and call over half the time spent in them wasted
Bad meetings cost a typical large employer more than US$130m a year, and the workers themselves consider 58 percent of their meeting time unnecessary
The new study from the Jabra Research Institute found that 58 percent of meeting time is unnecessary, equal to a full working month of lost productivity per employee each year.
Holger Reisinger, senior vice president of Jabra's Enterprise Video Business Unit, said companies wrongly treat bad meetings as "an irritation, not a financial risk," and that dreaded meetings mean a firm is "already paying the price."
The cost compounds after the meeting ends, the report found.
It said 66 percent of workers regularly leave meetings with unclear action items, 59 percent need a follow-up meeting as a direct result, and 59 percent generate additional work to recover from the confusion.
Jabra describes this as "meeting debt," where unresolved outcomes drive ongoing work long after the meeting closes.
The report also points to a human cost that bears on workforce wellbeing.
It found that 87 percent of employees report some level of "meeting dread," that 42 percent reach their energy limit within two hours of back-to-back meetings, and that 83 percent reach it within four hours.
As workers hit those limits, the quality of their participation declines and meetings become more likely to fail, according to Jabra.
Technology remains a barrier, the report found.
Three in four meetings experience at least one technical issue, costing nearly 11 minutes per hybrid meeting and three working days of lost productivity per employee each year.
The report attributes about US$8.27m of the annual cost at a 5,000-person enterprise to technology failures alone.
Inclusion suffers as a result, the report said.
Around half of remote participants report feeling forgotten, talked over or excluded, and 59 percent of women report feeling excluded from side conversations when participating remotely.
Jabra said inadequate technology amplifies existing gaps in participation and visibility.
Although 75 percent of workers have tried AI meeting tools, fewer than one in three use them regularly, the report found, with poor audio and unclear conversations limiting the accuracy of AI-generated outputs.
"AI can enhance a well-run meeting, but it can't fix a broken one," Reisinger said.
The report, based on a survey of more than 2,300 workers across seven markets, treats that wasted time as a measurable liability rather than a workplace nuisance.
