YouGov study for Comet Meetings: in Belgium, 85% of managers still face pointless meetings and 7 employees in 10 have never been trained to run one.
Seven employees in ten would like their company to improve the way it organises meetings.
Research institute YouGov surveyed 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 some traits are shared by all 3 management cultures, others reveal very different practices and trends. In Belgium, the usefulness of meeting is in question, even though a large majority of employees are asking for better organised meetings. For Comet, a specialist in co-meeting (venues in the city dedicated to meetings), the intention to meet is certainly there in Belgium, but work on management and on training in how to run a meeting is still needed.
Key findings among Belgian employees
- 85% of Belgian managers still face pointless meetings
- 31% of Belgians never hold face-to-face meetings
- 72% of respondents would like meetings to be better organised
- 70% of Belgians have never been prepared for running a meeting
« The meeting is a key moment in a company. This study shows that it has not yet reached its full potential », comments Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet Meetings. « We are ready to drive the future-of-work revolution employees are waiting for, as they call for change in how useful and how well prepared team moments are. Our mission is also to make employers aware of the situation », he concludes.
Acute Belgian meeting fatigue, a lasting syndrome
We have met too often and for too long, with little of use coming out of it: that is meeting overload. Only 13% of Belgian employees find all their meetings useful and a quarter find them entirely pointless. For those people, meetings represent a waste of time close to a full working day a week on average. Meanwhile, 85% of Belgian managers say they still face pointless meetings. Better organised meetings in employees' daily routine, whether they manage teams or not, is a genuine expectation: in Belgium, close to 72% of workers express it. That figure even rises to 82% among respondents in Brussels.
A lack of preparation for meetings
While the time spent in meetings remains fairly significant, it is not yet used to build team cohesion and performance. Expectations are nonetheless high: 72% of Belgians would like their company to improve the way it meets. As for meeting preparation, the figures make the picture worse: 70% of employees in Belgium have never been trained in meetings. Only 46% of managers have been trained at least once. Notably, regional differences appear: employees in Brussels are the best prepared (40%), ahead of Wallonia (31%) and Flanders, which comes last (28%).
According to Victor Carreau, CEO of Comet Meetings: « Looking closely at the figures in this study, we see that 85% of the Belgians surveyed consider meetings to be regularly pointless. That figure is high, but it points to a need: companies must turn the meeting into a collective moment that allows people both to socialise and to rally around the goals to be achieved. Getting there requires method and training. That is the very purpose of Comet Meetings, to set our clients on the path to the meeting of tomorrow, and our venues as well as the services we provide there are geared to that goal. Our teams address this challenge every day. That is also why we recently created the role of Meeting Evangelist, held by Florian Guillot, to take on these challenges. »
