BY: MELVIN PHUN
Our recent Cost of Bad Meetings study at Jabra found that unnecessary meetings, technology failures and unclear outcomes are costing companies more than US$130 million a year in lost productivity.
We call this problem meeting debt: the time, energy and focus that bad meetings take from people, adding up week after week without ever showing on a balance sheet.
For Malaysian organisations, this matters more than ever.
Hybrid work is now firmly part of how the country operates. Since 1 August, eligible civil servants have worked remotely two days a week under the Government’s new hybrid work policy, and much of the private sector settled into a similar rhythm long ago.
That makes the meeting, whether it’s in a boardroom in KL or on a laptop at home, the place where most of our collaboration now happens, and where bad meetings cost organisations the most.
Where the Time Goes
On average, workers spend eight hours a week in meetings, a full working day.
They told us that 58% of that time is unnecessary. That adds up to roughly a full working month of lost productivity per person every year.
The damage doesn’t stop when the meeting ends.
Our research shows that 66% of workers regularly leave meetings with unclear action items. 59% need a follow-up meeting as a result, and 59% end up doing extra work to sort out the confusion. One bad meeting leads to another, then to a round of clarifying emails, then to work done twice.
The Broken Room We’ve Learned to Tolerate
Technology is a big part of the problem. 75% of hybrid meetings run into at least one tech failure: people who can’t be heard, video that won’t connect, a room that takes ten minutes to set up. Each failure costs nearly 11 minutes per hybrid meeting, or about three working days per employee every year.
The bigger the room, the bigger the problem.
Large meeting rooms lose 30% more time to tech failures than small ones, and mic problems become more common as the room fills up. The boardroom, where many of the most important decisions are made, is often where meetings struggle the most.
We would never accept an office where the lights failed in most meetings. Yet many of us have come to accept meeting rooms that fail just as often.
The Dread Index
Bad meetings also take a toll on how people feel about their work. 87% of workers told us they feel some level of dread about meetings, and that dread grows with the number of meetings on their calendar.
Dread is not just a feeling. It predicts how a meeting will go. People who walk in expecting a meeting to fail are far more likely to leave without clear next steps.
Energy and Focus Run Out Early
Alongside the financial cost, there is a human cost that is harder to measure. Everyone has a limit to how many meetings they can handle before their attention starts to slip.
Our research found that 42% of workers reach their energy limit within two hours of back-to-back meetings, and 83% within four. For many, that means running on empty before lunch, and still being expected to contribute for the rest of the day.
Women and Junior Staff Feel It Most
The burden of bad meetings isn’t shared equally, and poor meeting technology makes the gap wider.
Around half of remote participants say they are forgotten, talked over or left out.
Women feel this more acutely: 59% say they are excluded from side conversations when joining remotely, and women report worse experiences than men on being talked over, hearing the room and seeing who is speaking.
Seniority matters too.
Individual contributors are much more likely than those at C-suite level to be overlooked in meetings. As hybrid work spreads across both the public and private sectors, making sure the person on the screen is heard as clearly as the person at the table is a basic matter of fairness.
AI Can Help, But It Can’t Fix a Broken Meeting
Many organisations are looking to AI to fix this. Three in four workers have tried AI meeting tools such as transcription and automated summaries, but fewer than one in three use them regularly. Accuracy and trust are the main barriers.
The reason is simple. AI is only as good as the meeting it listens to. Garbled audio produces a garbled transcript, and a meeting with no clear decision produces a summary with no clear decision. AI can make a good meeting better, but it cannot repair a broken one.
Redesigning Meetings by Purpose
The good news is that meeting debt can be fixed, and the first step costs nothing. Our research groups meetings into four types, and each one needs a different approach.
● Decision-making meetings should be small and focused, with a pre-read sent in advance. No agenda, no meeting.
● Creative and problem-solving sessions need a facilitator, a clear goal and the right tools, set up and tested beforehand.
● One-to-ones and informal catch-ups build trust and culture in a way no app or platform can replace. Protect them.
● Announcements, status updates and routine information sharing are one-way communication. An email, a shared document or a short recorded update will often do the job better.
So before sending the next invite, ask: does this need to be a meeting at all? And if it does, what will make it work.
*Melvin Phun is the Country Manager of Jabra Malaysia
-HR HUB
