Meetings and summertime do they mix well? This is the question posed by Bird Office in its new study, "Summer at the office", based on 1,120 testimonials. "As you might expect, [meetings] are less productive than the rest of the year, except for 20%, who consider that their company meetings are effective, even in summer", stresses the specialist in meeting rooms. Three major factors - which, all things considered, are quite logical - explain this lack of efficiency: the number of absences (49%), the general lack of concentration (40%) and the heat in the meeting room... As a result, meetings do not seem to have become a "pastime" to fill these summer days, which are by nature less busy, as the study points out: "We thought that many of you would do more meetings than usual, simply because you have nothing else to do. In the end, we were surprised: only 5% of you do this".
Other findings include the fact that 42% of those surveyed take advantage of the drop in activity to see their colleagues outside the office more often, while 35% of studious employees use the summer to catch up on their professional projects. Finally, it should be noted that summer does not necessarily mean idleness, as a third of employees (32%) believe that they work better during this period of calm. This is particularly true of small organisations, with the figure rising to 46% among SMEs.
