Yahoo Finance's Diane King Hall discusses a workplace productivity report released by Microsoft which analyzed how much time workers spend in meetings per week and details the impact that time spend has on employee performance.
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: The pandemic changed the way that people work, especially when it comes to meetings. And now Microsoft is actually quantifying it for us. The tech giant releasing its annual Workplace Productivity Report. And it shows just how much time we are all spending in Zoom rooms, the report finding that people spend the equivalent of two days a week in meetings or on email. That's a heck a lot of time.
Diane King Hall is back with us here to discuss this in a day. And I think a lot of the question is whether or not your productivity goes up if you work from home because you're not distracted in the office. But it sounds like spending a heck a lot of time looking into that computer and at the Zoom meetings.
DIANA KING HALL: Indeed. Let me give it a little bit more context. Now, those figures don't even include time spent on instant messaging like Slack or other impromptu conversations. The study showing that both workers and bosses are complaining this digital overload is affecting their abilities to do their actual jobs, especially the more innovative or creative aspects.
In fact, about two thirds of workers say all the pings and dings detracts from their time and energy. So you're going to get that at home too when we're talking about just the possible detractors from time. And one of the things that was of note in this report from Microsoft is that the meetings, people complain about them. But there's also this FOMO aspect to those meetings.
Are you both missing out? Could it potentially affect your role within your workplace if you're not in the room? But I will say, it does seem to be a little bit of an agenda because this is all in the AI context for this report. So Microsoft, a leader in the AI space.
SEANA SMITH: Might be a little bias here.
DIANA KING HALL: Yes!
SEANA SMITH: No, but it is. But we have seen, this was a fear that so many people were spending so much time in meetings. And we've seen some companies make some changes to try to address this. Shopify was one of those companies that announced that they were going to be scheduling blocks of times that employees should not be allocated or should not be in meetings.
Some companies went as far as blocking off a specific day. Our company actually, Yahoo, even did that for a period of time. And in a recent interview, Shopify's chief operating officer saying that they deleted 322,000 hours of meetings by making some of those adjustments.
DIANA KING HALL: Yes.
SEANA SMITH: That is a lot of time. And if you take into account that so many people aren't able to do their own work because they're spending it in meetings-- I think the real question though, is how productive each of these meetings is.
DIANA KING HALL: Right, meetings and emails because I'm recently-- I'm new to the company. But already, the flood of emails. And it's like, what's important, what's not important? So one of the other things that stood out within this survey, this report was about how comfortable people would be with AI playing more of a role with regard to this.
And so people did say they'd be comfortable with using AI for administrative tasks. I get that because some of those admin tasks, you're like, can a robot do this, please?
SEANA SMITH: Exactly.
[LAUGHS]
I wouldn't mind if it took some off my plate some days. All right, Diane, thanks so much for--
DIANA KING HALL: You got it.
SEANA SMITH: --coming on for that.
