Clarizen Survey Reveals Workers Consider Status Meetings a Productivity-Killing Waste of Time

Featured article and infograohic by Clarizen

On January 22, 2015, San Mateo, California based Clarizen, a leader in enterprise work collaboration software announced survey results that show status meetings undermine worker productivity with lengthy preparation requirements and distracted, multi-tasking participants. Three in five employed adults reported that preparing for a status meeting “takes longer than the meeting itself,” while more than one-third of those who attend status meetings called them a waste of their time.

Compared to a similar Clarizen/Harris Poll survey conducted in 2011, the latest results show that employed Americans spend an average of 4.6 hours each week preparing for status meetings and 4.5 hours attending general status meetings, up from four hours each week four years ago. New results also indicate that almost three in five workers reported that they multitask during status meetings. Almost half of respondents would rather “do any unpleasant activity” than sit in a status meeting, including going to the Department of Motor Vehicles or watching paint dry. A status meeting is defined as a meeting with updates for team members on completed and active work tasks. Strategy, brainstorming and company planning meetings were not included in this definition of a status meeting.

Additional Survey Findings:

– 60 percent of status meeting attendees reported that preparing for a status meeting takes longer than the meeting itself.

– 46 percent of employed Americans would rather do any unpleasant activity than sit in a status meeting, with 18 percent opting for a trip to the DMV and 17 percent choosing to watch paint dry.

– 35 percent of status meeting attendees called status meetings “a waste of my time.”

“Survey results continue to show that status meetings do not boost employee productivity,” said Avinoam Nowogrodski, founder and CEO of Clarizen. “In today’s modern workplace, where demands are constantly changing, employees need easy, real-time access to their discussions, work content and processes. This is what fuels employee productivity and quality work, not sitting in status meetings or preparing lengthy status reports. Clarizen enables company-wide collaboration, accountability and transparency, meaning workers spend less time in meetings and more time completing actual, meaningful work.”

The survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Poll on behalf of Clarizen from November 20-24, 2014 among 2,066 adults ages 18 and older.

Clarizen offers an alternative to status meetings, combining true social engagement with powerful project management to redefine enterprise collaboration. Clarizen delivers on its vision of the work graph – organically connecting social context, tasks and projects on a single cloud-based platform – to enable collaboration that drives results.

Survey Methodology

This survey was conducted online within the United States from November 20-24, 2014 among 2,066 adults ages 18 and older (among which 1,005 are employed), by Harris Poll on behalf of Clarizen via its Quick Query omnibus product. Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.

About Clarizen
Clarizen is the leader in enterprise-class work collaboration and project management solutions that harness the power of the cloud to get work done efficiently, effectively and with better results. Fast to deploy and easy to use, Clarizen is redefining enterprise collaboration by connecting social context with tasks and projects to drive increased productivity and profitability. Clarizen fuels the high-performance teams of more than 2,300 organizations across 76 countries, including dozens of the Fortune 500. Most recently, Gigaom Research rated Clarizen at the top in its Sector RoadMap: process-based collaboration in 2014 report. Founded in 2006, Clarizen is privately held with offices in San Mateo, California and Hod HaSharon, Israel. For more information, visit www.clarizen.com.