HALF of business people daydream during meetings, according to a survey.
And many of them “zone out” of meetings after just 17 minutes, says the poll by the Anti-PowerPoint Party.
Over half of the 1,000 businessmen and women questioned admitted to regularly daydreaming in the boardroom while more than one in 10 has fallen asleep during a “dull” presentation.
Meetings with unfocused agendas, inter-departmental bickering and an over-reliance on presentation software such as PowerPoint are most likely to send participants into a temporary stupor.
One in 10 businessmen “dread” tiresome and drawn-out meetings so much that they will deliberately arrive late or make excuses to leave early.
APPP founder and communication coach Matthias Poehm said the findings should serve as a “wake-up call” to British businesses.
He said: “The results show that in the majority of cases, the meetings don't fulfil what one expects.
“This is because they are allowed to over-run and lose focus and put too much emphasis on tools such as PowerPoint, which often simply bombard people with results until their attention switches off.
“Every minute wasted through bad and boring meetings is money lost.”
The survey suggests that the average businessman spends six hours and 38 minutes in meetings each week – equating to 306 hours and 24 minutes or roughly 38 days a year spent in meetings.
At managerial level, the figure rises to 16 hours and 12 minutes per week, or 777 hours and six minutes per year.
The average meeting lasts 47 minutes, but the research reveals that those present will start losing concentration just over a third of the way through.
