Seven out of ten employees would like their company to improve the way it organizes meetings
Yougov, the research institute, questioned 3,000 Europeans, including 1,003 Belgians, on behalf of Comet Meetings about meeting practices in the 3 countries where the company operates: Belgium, France and Spain. While certain characteristics are common to all 3 managerial cultures, others reveal very different practices and trends. In Belgium, the usefulness of meetings is questioned, while the vast majority of employees are keen to improve the way they organize their meetings. For Comet, a specialist in co-meeting facilities, if the intention to meet in Belgium is present, work on management and training in meeting organization is necessary.
- 85% of Belgian executives are still confronted with unnecessary meetings
- 31% of Belgians never hold face-to-face meetings
- 72% of respondents would like meetings to be better organized
- 70% of Belgians have never been prepared to lead a meeting
"The meeting is a major corporate moment. This study shows that it has not yet found its full potential," comments Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet Meetings. "We're ready to start the revolution in the future of work expected by employees, who are demanding changes in terms of usefulness and preparation for team moments. Our mission is also to make employers aware of this situation," he concludes.
We've been meeting too often for too long. And not much useful comes out of it: reunionitis. Only 13% of Belgian employees find all their meetings useful, and a quarter find them totally useless. For these people, meetings represent a waste of time almost equivalent to an average working day per week. 86% of Belgian managers, meanwhile, say they still have to deal with useless meetings. A better organization of meetings within the daily life of employees, whether managers or non-managers, is a real expectation: in Belgium, nearly 72% of workers declare that they have this expectation. This figure rises to 82% for respondents in Brussels.
While the amount of time spent in meetings remains relatively high, it is not yet maximized for team cohesion and positive performance. And yet, expectations are high: 72% of Belgians would like their company to improve the way it holds meetings, while the figures for meeting preparation are even higher: 70% of employees in Belgium have never been trained to hold meetings. Only 46% of managers have been trained at least once. Notably, there are regional differences in this respect, with employees in Brussels being the best prepared (40%), compared with Wallonia (31%) and Flanders in last place (28%).
For Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet Meetings: " If we look closely at the figures from this study, we see that 85% of Belgians surveyed consider that meetings are regularly pointless.This figure is significant, but it reflects a necessity: companies must transform meetings into a collective time for socializing and mobilizing around the objectives to be achieved.To achieve this, method and training are required. It's CometMeetings' raison d'être to set its customers on the road to the meeting of tomorrow, and our premises and the services we offer are geared towards this objective. That's why we recently created the position of Meeting Evangelist, embodied by Florian Guillot, to meet these challenges..."
