How effective was your last business meeting? No, it’s not a rhetorical question – think back to your last meeting, whether it was in-person, via conference call or over telepresence. How would you describe it?

Do words like useful, timely, efficient, productive or valuable come to mind? Or are you thinking more along the lines of: interruptive, boring, inefficient and wasteful? If you resonate with the latter, you’re in the majority. Although in this case, being in the majority isn’t really a good thing.

Business meetings are time for people to collaborate, share ideas, discuss issues and find solutions. But, if those objectives aren’t being achieved, it might be time to seek an alternative method for everyone to get on the same page. After all, it takes a lot of effort to get everyone in the same room or even on the same phone line. The time dedicated to business meetings is time that shouldn’t be wasted.

Inefficient Meetings, By The Numbers

The preparation for and time spent in meetings adds up. According to a recent infographic, about 15 percent of any given organization’s time is spent in meetings. A number that’s been on a steady increase since 2008. 25 million meetings occur each day in the United States, and the estimated annual cost of unproductive meetings is over 37 billion dollars. Now, that’s a lot of time and a lot of dollars, but what about the result?

Business executives classify 67 percent of meetings as failures. The top three groups blamed for under-productive meetings are:

1. Multitaskers

Whether they’re checking email, sending IMs, finishing unrelated projects or deciding where they’re going to lunch that day, participants whose minds are elsewhere contribute to meeting failures.

2. Disengaged remote participants

Just because you’re on the meeting call, doesn't mean you're fully engaged with the meeting content. 

3. Lack of planning or structure

Planning a successful meeting takes effort. Without a well-planned meeting, participants are much less likely to benefit.

Cisco Spark Eliminates Many Meeting Inefficiencies

Many of the issues leading to inefficient meetings would benefit from a software solution. The former way of holding meetings isn’t getting the job done because they don’t provide the tools to be successful. While there’s no shortage of meeting software options available, there’s one currently owning 51 percent of the market share: Cisco Spark.

Cisco Spark owns much of the market because it intuitively improves conferencing and collaboration. It’s a complete business collaboration service from the Cisco cloud that enables customers to message, meet or call anyone, anywhere and anytime. The service is hosted by Cisco and sold by Marco. Cisco Spark has made a name for itself by being simple, secure and complete.

Cisco Spark allows for seamless content sharing and has an end-to-end security system in place. Learn more about Cisco Spark and what it can do for your business.