Post-COVID Virtual Meetings Are Hurting People. (And Profit, Too.)

COVID Changed Meetings. We Never Changed Them Back.

COVID forced businesses to move meetings online almost overnight.

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet became essential tools. They kept people connected and businesses operating when working together in person wasn’t an option.

The problem is that the meeting culture never really reset.

Virtual meetings became so easy to schedule that they became the default way to communicate. Need an update? Schedule a meeting. Have a question? Schedule a meeting. Need to make a decision? Schedule a meeting.

And the numbers show what happened.

Microsoft found that meeting time and frequency increased significantly after the shift to hybrid and remote work. Its research found that 68% of employees don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday, while inefficient meetings ranked as the number one productivity disruptor.  

We solved the problem of not being able to meet in person.

Then we created a new problem.

We started meeting about everything.

The Human Cost Is Becoming Hard to Ignore

Meetings don’t just consume time. They consume attention.

When your calendar is filled with back-to-back calls, you’re constantly switching between conversations, emails, messages, documents and actual work.

Microsoft found that employees spend 57% of their time communicating through meetings, email and chat, leaving only 43% for creating things such as documents, spreadsheets and presentations.  

There is also a real human cost to spending hours on video calls.

Researchers at Stanford developed the Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale after studying video conferencing fatigue. Their research found that the frequency, duration and intensity of Zoom meetings were associated with greater fatigue.  

And the problem isn’t limited to feeling tired.

A 2023 Stanford study found that as video meetings became longer and more frequent, participants reported greater video-conference fatigue and lower feelings of social connection.  

Atlassian’s research tells a similar story. In a survey of 5,000 knowledge workers, 76% said they feel drained on days with lots of meetings, while more than half said they work overtime because meetings prevent them from finishing their work during the day.  

That’s where the financial cost starts.

The Meeting Isn’t Free

A 30-minute meeting with one person costs 30 minutes.

A 30-minute meeting with 10 people costs five hours of collective employee time.

And that’s before you account for the time people lose getting into the meeting, switching away from focused work, recovering their attention and finishing whatever they couldn’t get done because they were in the meeting.

Atlassian found that 78% of workers say they are expected to attend so many meetings that it’s difficult to get their work done, and 51% report working overtime several days a week because of meeting overload.  

This doesn’t mean every meeting is bad.

Some conversations need to happen in real time. Decisions, difficult conversations, collaboration and genuine human connection can all have a legitimate place on the calendar.

But a meeting should have to earn that place.

If something can be documented, document it.

If an update can be delivered asynchronously, send it.

If a decision can be made without pulling ten people into a room, make the decision without them.

The goal isn’t fewer meetings for the sake of fewer meetings.

The goal is to stop wasting people’s time on meetings that never needed to happen in the first place.

Because when companies eliminate unnecessary meetings, they’re not just giving people their calendars back.

They’re giving them time to actually do their jobs.