This manager recommends: Abolish all standard meetings

Dusseldorf Strategy meetings, telephone conferences, zoom calls – on average, German office workers spend 16.5 hours a month in meetings. This is the result of a study that looked at the meeting culture before the corona pandemic.

The time employees spend in meetings hasn’t necessarily improved in the home office era. If anything, there have been even more digital obligations: be it drinking coffee online with colleagues or virtual family reunions.

As a study by Stanford University shows, video conferences and hybrid meetings are perceived as significantly more strenuous than “real” meetings.

Researchers found that a total of 13.8 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men felt “very” to “extremely” exhausted after Zoom calls. This feeling of exhaustion after a day of consecutive online meetings is called “Zoom Fatigue.”