Brits sit through almost 10,000 meetings in their career

They’ll probably spend most of that time daydreaming, forgetting their notebooks and trying not to fall asleep

Long suffering British employees will sit through a mind numbing 9,776 meetings in their working lifetime – with over half of them being deemed as completely pointless, research from Deliveroo for Business has revealed.

New research of the nation’s office workers has discovered the average Brit reckons 51% of the meetings they attend every week are utterly useless. So much so that a staggering one in ten of the employees who took part in the study admitted to having nodded off during a meeting at some point in their life.

In a bid to get through the tedium, the survey also revealed we will munch through 10,753 sandwiches, 19,552 chocolate biscuits and drink 15,642 cups of tea during our lifetime of meetings, the poll found. In fact, 85% of those polled said they are much more likely to be enthusiastic about a meeting if food and drink is laid on.

The poll of 2,000 full time employees found a quarter of adults dread one to one sessions with their boss about their progress, 26% hate awkward catch-up lunches with clients and 17% said they loathe annual general meetings. Of those polled, 17% claim they have completely clammed-up in a meeting, 26% said they have not listened to one word that was said – and 27% said they spent the duration of the meeting thinking about what they were going to have for dinner.

Almost one in ten pass the time by flirting with colleagues over the meeting table, while 20% admit they text their other half to get through the boredom, while four in ten of the adults surveyed said they like it when their diary is packed full of meetings as it gets them out of doing any ‘proper’ work.

But six in ten moaned that meetings just create more unnecessary work.

“Meetings can be dull and traditionally the food and drink offered in them is pretty lacklustre, consisting of dreary biscuits thrown on a plate and lukewarm tea from an old office urn,” said Juan Diego Farah, Global Head of Deliveroo for Business. “Some meetings do drag on and breaking up proceedings with breaks for high quality food and drink can really boost people’s energy levels and their enthusiasm.”

More than a quarter of workers say they are embarrassed when visitors come to their office for meetings as their hospitality is so poor – confessing to barely being able to scrape together tea and biscuits. 14% said they only have chipped, mismatched mugs in their office and 22% said they are guilty of plonking stale biscuits on a plate in order to look presentable.

Share your meeting nightmares and horror stories with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.