Hate meetings? Your boss does too

Tired of attending useless meetings? Executives spend an average of 25 hours a week in meetings, yet nearly half of those Zoom calls and project updates could disappear without any negative impact, according to a survey of more than 10,000 desk workers by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by Salesforce Inc.-owned Slack Technologies. Shopify Inc., the Canadian e-commerce site, said it’s on track to eliminate 320,000 hours of meetings this year by ending all recurring meetings with more than two people, forbidding meetings on Wednesday, and limiting big gatherings, along with encouraging staff to decline some invites. Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $100 million a year at big organizations, according to a separate survey, which also found that workers only decline 14% of invites even though they’d prefer to back out of 31% of them. Non-executives spend an average of 10.6 hours a week in meetings, the Future Forum survey found, and said that 43% of them could be done away with.