Key Learnings from our 2024 Global Meeting Survey

Meetings are at the crux of decision-making for businesses and other organisations, enabling improved performance.  

And effective decision-making could not be more important at a time when The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance has identified that investors are still doubling down on ensuring boards are working at the top of their game.  

Calls for more rigorous board evaluations, for CEOs to show stronger oversight and for board members to prove their compensation packages equate to the value they bring to the organisation show that stakeholders are scrutinising all aspects of governance, of which the quality of meetings and their outputs forms an important part.  

And this is the case across sectors: 

• In the corporate world, shareholders demand that board members work together to steer the strategy of the business towards its goals. 
• In local government, citizens trust their representatives to make informed decisions that affect the services they rely on every day. 
• In healthcare, stakeholders must use all of the available data at hand to back up strategies that literally relate to matters of life and death.  

But what do meetings look like today? Are they effective, productive and useful? Are attendees happy with how they run?  

According to iBabs’ research survey, more than a fifth of respondents (22%) said they spent more than half of their working week in meetings.  

If the majority of your role involves meetings, you need to make sure that this is time well spent. And that is why we wanted to look into the state of meeting management in 2024.  

The rise of remote and hybrid working has also shifted the meeting landscape in recent years, and we wanted to understand how that manifests today.  

This report shows the attitudes to meetings from respondents across a range of roles in a number of sectors, some who attend meetings and some who organise them. We asked questions about the entire meeting process to find out how effective meetings are and how we can improve them in the future.  

Read the State of Meeting Management 2024 report to find out more.  

Key findings

Preparation time

One of those striking outcomes from the study was that only 60% of respondents felt they had enough time to prepare properly for a meeting. Whilst this represents a modest improvement of 5% from a previous study in 2022, it remains concerning that more than two-fifths of meeting attendees do not feel fully versed in meeting topics when they enter the room.  

Meeting Minutes

As meeting minutes are often a legal requirement and, even if not, certainly provide a useful record of decision-making and discussion, we wanted to discover whether organisations were prioritising them. 

It appears that there has been no improvement in minute taking and distribution from our previous study, with just 65% of respondents confirming that this happens in their meetings. 

Sharing information

Although many respondents do not have the time to prepare thoroughly, they are receiving the relevant information in advance. 77% said they had the documents they required in good time, an increase from 60% in our previous report. 

This still leaves nearly a quarter of meeting attendees without the requisite detail they need to be able to contribute effectively to the discussion. Indeed, more than a quarter of meeting chairs (28%) either disagree with the statement that they have access to the right information they need to prepare for the meeting or are neutral on the topic. Also, just over half of participants (55%) say they have access to this information well in advance of the meeting.

Tracking action points

What good is decision-making if you don’t do anything about it? Ensuring action points stay on the radar and that stakeholders follow up on them in a timely manner is what turns effective meetings into tangible and positive change. 

Our study found that less than 50% of respondents felt this was happening in their organisation, down from 67% in 2022. This highlights a concerning suggestion that, even if meetings run in a satisfactory manner, they won’t necessarily be followed up on.  

Technology

Although only 59% of respondents said they had access to a virtual or hybrid meeting room or conference call environment, this is one finding in which the results vary widely across sectors. Nearly 90% of those working in large corporations had access to this facility, but for the blue light employees, where there is less opportunity to work remotely, only 53% could access online meetings. 

One interesting change is the decrease in the numbers of respondents using a document management system (DMS). That stood at 52% in 2022 but dropped to 43% in 2024. One explanation is that some of these companies are favouring a board portal instead, which also stores their meeting files and documents. 

Board portals are indeed becoming more popular for managing the entire meeting ecosystem. Although an increase from the 15% of participants who said they used this type of solution in 2022, only one in three respondents confirmed they used them within their organisation in 2024. This means there are many organisations that could streamline their meeting process with one simple fix. 

Document Security

Cybersecurity is a game of cat and mouse between hackers and security officers, with criminals continually looking for new ways to penetrate organisations and access their files. Given that information relating to meetings is often business-sensitive, keeping it secure is essential. 

72% of our respondents were confident that their organisations shared sensitive information between meeting participants in a secure manner, which leaves more than a quarter of meetings with vulnerabilities in terms of cyber safety. 

Key recommendations

Based on the feedback from respondents about their experiences of meetings, iBabs has collected some key recommendations for improving the effectiveness of the meeting process. In order to positively impact the productivity of your meetings, increase satisfaction for attendees and improve the outcomes of your meetings, follow these best practices:

• Share Documents

Distribute documents well in advance of meetings to allow attendees adequate time to prepare and enter the meeting fully versed in the topics at hand. 

• Cloud Collaboration

Share papers for the meeting in the cloud to allow all attendees to access the latest versions on their devices. 

• Action Item Tracking
  Track action points from meetings so participants understand their assigned tasks and monitor their progress in real-time.
• Meeting Optimisation
  Implement clear strategies to avoid holding unnecessary meetings and to limit the time spent in meetings overall.
• Technological Integration
  Provide technological tools and resources that allow for timely document sharing and the dissemination of the agenda and other meeting papers. 
• Documentation and auditing
  Prioritise the documentation of meetings to ensure clarity on decisions, provide an audit trail and help to facilitate the completion of action items in a timely manner. 
• Culture of preparation
  Encourage a culture shift towards embracing the virtues of punctual communication and advanced preparation.