The world of meetings as seen by Belgians, a study carried out by Comet Meetings and YouGov in 2022.
MORE THAN HALF OF BELGIANS SPEND THE EQUIVALENT OF ONE DAY A WEEK IN MEETINGS
Seven employees out of ten would like their company to improve the way it organises meetings.
Yougov, the research institute, surveyed 3000 Europeans, including 1003 Belgians, on behalf of Comet Meetings on the subject of meeting practices in the 3 countries where the company is established: Belgium, France and Spain. While some characteristics are common to the 3 managerial cultures, others show very different practices and trends. In Belgium, the usefulness of getting together raises questions, while a large majority of employees are asking for improvements in the way their meetings are organised. For Comet, a specialist in co-meeting (venues dedicated to meetings in the city), while the intention to get together in Belgium is indeed there, work on management and training in how to organise a meeting is necessary.
The key figures for Belgian employees:
- 86% of Belgian managers are still faced with useless meetings
- 31% of Belgians never hold face-to-face meetings
- 72% of the people surveyed would like meetings to be better organised
- 70% of Belgians have never been prepared for running a meeting
« The meeting is a major moment in the company. This study shows that it has not yet found its full potential,” comments Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet Meetings. « We are ready to launch the revolution of the future of work that employees are waiting for, as they are asking for changes when it comes to the usefulness and the preparation of team moments. Our mission is also to make employers aware of this situation », he concludes.
Acute Belgian meeting-itis, a persistent syndrome
We have met far too often for far too long. And not much useful comes out of it, by the way: meeting-itis. Only 13% of Belgian employees find that all their meetings are useful and a quarter find them totally useless. For these people, meetings therefore represent a waste of time almost equivalent to one working day per week on average. 86% of Belgian managers, for their part, say they are still faced with useless meetings. Better organisation of meetings within employees' daily lives, whether they are managers or have no supervisory role, is a real expectation: in Belgium nearly 72% of workers say they have this expectation. This figure even rises to 82% among Brussels respondents.
A lack of preparation for meetings
While the time spent in meetings remains relatively significant, it is not yet maximised to gain in team cohesion and to achieve positive performance. And yet expectations are high: 72% of Belgians would like their company to improve the way it holds meetings. As for preparation for meetings, the figures make this observation even heavier: 70% of employees in Belgium have never been trained in meetings. Only 46% of managers have been trained at least once. Notably, regional differences can be observed in this respect: Brussels employees are the best prepared (40%) compared with Wallonia (31%) and Flanders, which comes last (28%).
For Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet Meetings “If we look closely at the figures of this study, we see that 86% of the Belgians surveyed consider that meetings are regularly useless. This figure is significant but it reflects a necessity: companies must turn the meeting into a collective time that allows people both to socialise and to rally around the objectives to be reached. To get there, method and training are necessary. It is Comet Meetings' raison d'être to set its clients on the path of the meeting of tomorrow, and our venues as well as the services we offer there are geared towards that objective. Our teams respond to this challenge every day. That is moreover the reason why we recently created the role of Meeting Evangelist, embodied by Florian Guillot, in order to meet these challenges…
