Yac State of Work Study 2022

1. Meetings

With our State of Work Study, we aimed to understand how too many meetings affects workers and their organizations.

‍Meeting overload is a decades old workplace issue, and technology still hasn’t solved it. The effects often compound as companies scale.

The changes in work brought about by the global pandemic has created a perfect storm of maxed out work calendars due to an increase of unchecked virtual meetings and colleagues continually asking during a typical workday, “Hey, can we jump on a call?”

There are too many pointless meetings

When asked if they felt they had too many meetings at work a majority (50.5%) said yes.

Not all meetings are created equal, with survey respondents stating that 35.3% of their work meetings are pointless.

Here are the top reasons for why they thought a meeting was pointless: 

• 57.5% - Could have been an email
• 40.3% - No clear agenda
• 33.5% - Poor participation
• 33.5% - No meeting objective

Removing the majority of meetings would be a welcome change for workers

27% of respondents admit having 10 or more meetings a week (in-person, on the phone, virtual, etc., and 76% of those meetings last 45 minutes or less. 

The purging of a full meeting calendar would be an immediate win for many and allow teams to focus on what matters most.

Asked what benefits they would find by canceling real-time meetings? 62% stated they would save time, and 60% would free them time to work on something else. 

Over 31% of workers typically spend +30 minutes or more preparing for each meeting

That’s a lot of our work time spent in meetings. The organizational cost of meetings must also be taken into account, such as the amount of time spent on preparing and scheduling.

On top of this, 36% spend over 15 minutes doing the “coordinating calendar dance” to schedule a time that works for everyone.  

Why are we having so many meetings? Our study shows that workers say most of the meetings they attend are to:

• Share information - 26.1%
• Solve a problem - 15.9%
• Make a decision - 15.8%
• Plan - 12.8%
• Facilitate team building - 9.9%

Despite this, meetings remain important for team alignment when done right. When asked what is required for a meeting to be successful attendees stated:

• Decisions - 56.6%
• Agenda - 53.3% 
• Clear outcomes - 49.5%
• Start and end on-time - 46.1% 

Considered less important to meeting success were:

• Prep-work - 18.4% 
• Food and beverages - 16.9% 
• Icebreakers - 12.2% 

Why are meetings so ingrained in the way we work? Because organizations gravitate towards them to solve most problems. They become part of the furniture. They're often baked into every week, and everyone attends them for fear of missing out on critical updates. 

Yet, our study clearly shows why knowledge workers feel you could cancel a real-time meeting and replace it with something else. 61.5% said their meetings were about “just sharing information”.‍

Defaulting to a meeting for the wrong reasons leads to the meeting madness that haunts many companies today. Deciding what should be a meeting is key but also understanding how other forms of communication (hint: asynchronous) can be just as good or better for what you’re trying to accomplish.

Zoom fatigue hasn’t gone anywhere

The influx of virtual meetings has brought a new pain to our workdays in the form of “Zoom fatigue.” 33% of workers stated they felt Zoom Fatigue in the last year.

Science proves that the sensation and tiredness we feel after back-to-back meetings is real and not good for our productivity. Fewer meetings would be a good place to start, but also conducting your next virtual meeting with the camera off can be a simple remedy.

‍The problem is, 47% of workers feel pressure to have the camera on during their virtual meetings.

‍When leaving a meeting 32% of survey respondents felt they had wasted their time. 30% also told us when leaving a meeting another is immediately scheduled. Some workers even call it “the meeting about the meeting.”

2. Work Life Balance

With everything we’ve been through the last year, when we asked if work-life balance had improved or deteriorated in the last 12 months, only 13% said it deteriorated, while 47% responded that it had improved.

Difficulties of the pandemic aside, many have embraced the flexibility of remote work, which has positively affected work-life balance for the better.

There’s still an expectation on being always available

Working from anywhere and away from watchful eyes has created new habits and expectations. Many knowledge workers feel the pressure to be always-on.

66% agree that management expects them to be available whenever needed. Always being connected and available creates a feeling of constant busyness. 78% admit to often feeling busy throughout their workday.

Those habits aren’t sustainable for most and don’t match up well with the flexible work options people are truly seeking. 

Unsurprisingly, the majority of workers want remote work options

Remote work is here to stay and organizations must continue to redesign workplace policies to keep up. Our study shows that workers know what they want, and it’s certainly not the way things were before.

In fact, 77% of those surveyed indicated that in the future they want to be working either fully remote or hybrid: 

Knowledge workers feel their work-life balance has improved but that doesn’t mean the last year hasn’t been without challenges. Balancing work, the pandemic, and new ways of working can be tough. We asked if in the last year they had felt any of the following at work:

‍Way too many people are feeling busy all the time (53.4%), overwhelmed (47.3%), or burnt out (40.3%).

Some of those moments of stress and anxiety can be linked to our work schedules, how it compares to our expectations, and the time we actually spend working.

Working early, late, and even on weekends

Our study showed that 43% were supposed to be on a 9 to 5 work schedule, but found that they start work early and/or finish work late, even on weekends.‍

Only 20% of workers stated that they had a totally flexible work schedule, with the ability to come and leave as needed.

Remote working is great, but not when you feel you need to be constantly doing more. 53% of respondents said their workdays had gotten longer over the last year. The study showed more that half of those respondents were finishing later (77%) and starting earlier (59%). 

The need to always be available results in work creeping itself into every part of our lives. Lunch and weekends are no longer off limits for work. Close to 40% have been forced to work on weekends: ‍

Too many meetings, greater workloads, poor communication, and our own FOMO is making work bleed over into our personal time.

The boundaries that governed our time in the office became fuzzier when working from home. Many workers haven’t been able to draw the line between work and personal life. And it seems that too much work is winning, forcing people to cancel the following:

• 40.8% - Lunch break
• 37.2% - Family time
• 30.2% - Exercise time
• 28.5% - Seeing friends
• 27.4% - A vacation

The most shocking stat? That nothing is sacred, with close to 1 in 4 respondents having even skipped a bathroom break.

Managers must stamp out presenteeism

Management has a big role to play to help recalibrate our relationship with our work. Leaders can assist in their team’s work life integration by offering greater transparency around mission, communication norms, and overall expectations.

Also key is the need to shift from a culture of presenteeism and activity tracking to understanding the results that workers generate and the value that they bring to the organization.

Showing face, unfortunately, is still a performance metric that carries too much weight and can lead to proximity bias.

When asked what was most important to their management to determine job performance, only 54.8% said the output they produced:

Output over needing to be present should be the new mantra. Focusing on the exact hours people work is outdated but 41% of respondents agreed that management uses software to track their activity. 

Interruptions from people is a barrier productivity

Being able to actually have impactful outputs requires being supported and set up for success. But the unplanned work around planned or deep work can get in the way of productivity.

‍We asked, “What keeps you from being the most productive?” ‍

• 21.6% - Unplanned conversations or requests from colleagues
• 14% - Work meetings
• 11.2% - Work notifications (Email, slack, apps)

Flexible schedules are sought after to recalibrate our work-life balance. One option that many employees are hoping to trial is the four-day work week:

3. Asynchronous Work

As many teams have gone “remote first,” the benefits of asynchronous communication have become immeasurable.

We can say that async work is having a moment. But many people are being left out of the party. When asked if they had heard of the term asynchronous communication before, only 39.9% said yes.

But the lure of a better way of working has its appeal. Knowledge workers expect the following benefits if they could work without the need for real-time messaging and meetings: ‍

• 52.6% - Increased productivity 
• 49.8% - Increased schedule flexibility (better control of time) 
• 49.2% - Improve work-life balance
• 46.1% - Clear and efficient communication

Asynchronous communication has a major role to play in making a dent in meeting overload. 65% admitted to us that in the last week they had a meeting that could have been an email or done asynchronously.  

Asynchronous communication provides equal or better results

Async is growing in popularity as more teams use it as the default method of communicating. Ridding themselves of unnecessary real-time meetings has become easier by applying async work practices.

30% of workers have been able to use asynchronous audio or video messages to replace real-time meetings and still get equal or better results. ‍

Working from anywhere has allowed organizations to hire from a global pool of talent. 59% of study respondents say they’re part of a multi-country organization.

Asynchronous communication has become vital for teams that are spread out across many time zones, allowing everyone to have equal footing and stay in the loop. Gone is the need to dial into a call very early in the morning or late at night. 

Working asynchronously helps reduce the noise around getting work done. It is a calmer way of working that doesn’t leave people feeling busy all the time. Lifting the need to answer immediately lets us be more thoughtful with colleagues but also focus on what really matters.

People are more likely to answer a manager over family and friends

The majority of knowledge workers (55.5%) admit that they would immediately answer a manager over family, friends, children, and partners: ‍

4. Team Communication

Our work days have become dominated by a flow of constant notifications we receive from the minute we log on.

Email, chat apps, and productivity tools are all vying for our attention, leading us down an always-on spiral that people can’t seem to get out of.

The pressure to respond is taking us away from doing real work. 79% of workers feel a lot or some pressure to answer an email or slack message as soon as you receive it.

That pressure is leading people to context switch constantly throughout the day just to answer messages even if they are unimportant. Chat apps are a major source of this pain because of the frequency at which colleagues share the first thing that comes to their minds. 

70% workers will respond to messages in less than 15 minutes

Workers admit they after receiving a chat app message (Slack, MS Teams, etc.), on average, 70% will respond in less than 15 minutes:‍

Real-time chat apps make it easy to ask quick messages, sending a cascade of notifications ringing across your colleagues' devices. 

66% respondents expect a reply in under 30 minutes

Knowledge workers are keeping pace by answering at rapid speeds, but also expect their messages to be answered almost immediately. After sending a work-related email or chat app message, 66% expect a reply in under 30 minutes.

Such rapid response times create work environments where team communication is shallow and chaotic. Very often it excludes those that can’t be available or “always-on,” depriving organizations from healthy and sustainable workflows and collaboration.

Justin Mitchell, CEO of Yac,

“If there's anything these stats show us, it's that meeting culture and communication expectations are massively impacting personal agency and productivity everywhere. A company where you're forced to work late, skip lunch, or even worse miss bathroom breaks, is not going to be around for much longer. Employees will simply find a healthier, more flexible workplace to spend their time. Burnout comes from a variety of places but it starts with poor communication practices that lead to too much time in meetings and not enough time in calm focused productivity”

The need for a quick response doesn’t lend itself well to thoughtful messaging. Rapid fire, real-time messaging often lacks the context and nuance needed by the recipient.

66% of study respondents feel that email and chat apps often or sometimes lead to miscommunication at work. Only 6% state that text-based communication (email or chat apps) never leads to miscommunication at work.

The great resignation has seen more workers seeking jobs that are aligned with how they want to work. 38.5% admit they’d quit their job due to poor team communication.

Methodology 

Yac partnered with market research firm Propeller Insights to survey 1,001 knowledge workers across the USA in the first quarter of 2022. All respondents were identified as knowledge workers (full-time employed individuals who hold an office position and/or “work with email, productivity tools, data, analyze information or think creatively” in a typical work week).

The surveyed population spanned an age range of 18-65 years; more than 25 industries; and all career levels, from entry-level to executives; companies sizes from 5 to +20,000 employees.