“This meeting could have been an email” is a thought that many employees have had pop up in their minds at least once in their careers. Though in-person communication is definitely essential, meetings can last way too long and actually end up costing businesses lots of money. Many times, for the sake of respecting everyone’s time, it’s best to communicate remotely. Especially when it comes to minor quibbles.

Reddit user u/mdlapla recently went viral on the r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit after sharing what can happen when you ask to have a completely unnecessary work meeting. They can rack up quite an expensive bill for the client. Scroll down for the full story, Pandas!

Unnecessary work meetings aren’t just a huge waste of time. They can also cost businesses and clients a pretty penny

Image credits: Rodeo Project Management Software (not the actual photo)

One employee share how their company dealt with a client who wanted an in-person meeting when an email would have sufficed

Image credits: gpointstudio (not the actual photo)

Image source: mdlapla

Employees often waste their work hours going to useless meetings, and are unable to say ‘no’ when invited

Unnecessary meetings are jaw-droppingly expensive because they lead to a lot of lost work productivity. Bloomberg reports that businesses in the United States lose around $100 million each year due to these sorts of meetings. And a whopping third of all meetings are utterly unnecessary.

According to research conducted by Professor Steven Rogelberg at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, your average employee spends around 18 hours per week in meetings. Going to ‘noncritical’ meetings ends up wasting roughly $25,000 per employee, per year.

“Meetings do control us, and bad meetings have an enormous cost. You get a meeting invite and say, ‘I don’t need to be there,’ yet you say yes—why?” Rogelberg told Bloomberg that most employees go to meetings even when they know they’re not vital.

This is often done to appear engaged, not to offend the organizer of the meeting, and to be up-to-date on any and all work-related info (because it’s a bother getting that info later). In short, there are lots of subtle reasons why people simply don’t decline meeting invitations.

The end result? Lots of wasted time, frustrated workers, and tons of grumbling about colleagues who ask unnecessary questions at the end of presentations.

Meetings have become longer and longer over the past couple of decades, costing the economy billions of dollars

Discovery Therapy ABA points out that the situation might be even worse. Referring to data collected by Zippia, they claim that there are 55 million meetings held every single week in the US. That’s roughly 11 million of these each day. This leads to roughly 24 billion (with a ‘b’) working hours being wasted annually and $37 billion lost each year due to unproductivity.

The problem is likely only to get worse. Since 2000, employees have been spending 8% to 10% more time in meetings every single year.

It’s up to managers to cut back on unnecessary in-person communication and to leave live meetings for only when they’re absolutely necessary. They also need to make the point of the entire meeting very clear, and upfront.

Meanwhile, the employees themselves have to start drawing some healthy boundaries as well: if a meeting is non-critical and it’ll affect your productivity, it’s best to say no. Diplomatically, of course.

The author revealed some more context in the comments

The readers were keen to share their opinions, as well as similar stories

Some people, however, weren’t too supportive of how the company handled the billing issue

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