Ineffective Meetings Can Cost a Company $130 Million a Year

How much time spent in meetings actually turns into decisions, progress, and real outcomes? According to a new global study by Jabra, based on over 2,300 professionals, the answer is less reassuring than most would expect. 58% of weekly meeting time is perceived as unnecessary, the equivalent of 26 lost working days per person, every year. In a company with roughly 5,000 employees, ineffective meetings combined with technology failures drive an estimated productivity loss of $130 million annually.

When Technology Makes Things Worse

A significant part of the problem lies in the tools themselves, not just how meetings are run. 75% of hybrid meetings and 52% of fully virtual ones are affected by audio, video, or connectivity issues. In hybrid meetings, technical disruptions cost an average of eleven minutes per session, adding up to three lost working days per person each year. Larger companies feel this most: organizations with over 1,000 employees lose 82% more time than those with fewer than 50, largely due to inconsistently equipped meeting rooms.

Who Pays the Price Most

The study also points to a less visible, but equally important, issue: the impact of hybrid meetings isn’t shared equally among participants. Around half of remote attendees report feeling overlooked or interrupted, with women and junior employees disproportionately affected. Women are 16% more likely to feel excluded from conversations when joining remotely, while junior employees are as much as 26% more likely to experience marginalization. It’s a data point that anyone focused on organizational equity and talent development should take seriously, since an exclusionary meeting culture tends to reflect, and often reinforce, imbalances that already exist within an organization.

A “Meeting Debt” That Builds Up Over Time

The data also reveals a knock on effect. 66% of participants regularly leave a meeting without clear next steps, which leads to a follow up session in 59% of cases. Adding to this, 87% of employees report some level of meeting related anxiety, a factor the study directly links to poorer outcomes. Those who approach meetings with frequent apprehension tend to end them with less clarity, fuelling what researchers call a genuine “meeting debt” that quietly accumulates inside organizations over time.

Why the Problem Isn’t Solved by Technology Alone

As Holger Reisinger, senior vice president of Jabra’s Enterprise video business unit, points out, treating unproductive meetings as a minor annoyance rather than a real financial risk is likely the core mistake. It’s a point closely relevant to anyone working on organizational design and cultural change: meeting culture isn’t a purely operational matter, it’s a reflection of how a company distributes attention, authority, and voice internally. It’s a theme that comes up often in Euren’s management consulting and change management engagements, where rethinking how people meet and decide together becomes part of a broader organizational transformation journey.

Artificial Intelligence Can’t Fix a Broken Meeting

The paradox revealed by the study is that, while companies increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to boost productivity, three in four employees have tried AI tools for transcripts and summaries, yet fewer than one in three use them regularly. The limitation, according to the research, isn’t the technology itself, but the conditions in which it’s used: poor audio and unclear conversations sharply reduce how useful these tools actually are. As Reisinger puts it, AI can enhance a well run meeting, but it can’t fix one that’s broken from the start.