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155 Meeting Statistics October 2026

Updated 155 primary-source citations Refreshed monthly

On this page
  1. Key Takeaways
  2. How much time do workers spend in meetings?
  3. How many meetings are unproductive?
  4. How much do meetings cost companies?
  5. How have remote work and time zones changed meetings?
  6. What happens to decisions and notes after a meeting?
  7. How fast are workers adopting AI meeting notes?
  8. Methodology and Sources

Meeting statistics for 2026 describe a workweek in which meetings take a large and growing share of the hours. Attendees surveyed at Google Cloud Next 2026 averaged 15.8 hours a week in meetings, close to two full workdays (Reclaim.ai, 2026 Google Cloud Next Deep Work Trends Report, May 2026). That is a sample of tech-conference attendees, not a national average, but calendar data from Microsoft and the National Bureau of Economic Research points the same way: more meetings than before 2020, with more people in each one.

The tools are changing just as fast. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats in the quarter to June 2026 (Microsoft, FY26 Q4 earnings release, Jul 2026), and meeting platforms now report their AI features as a growth line of their own.

The sections below cover time spent in meetings, how many are unproductive, what they cost, how remote work spread them across time zones, what gets lost after the call ends, and how fast AI meeting notes are being adopted. Every number links to the organization that produced it and carries the date of its data. The page is refreshed monthly.

Key Takeaways

How much time do workers spend in meetings?

Meetings take a large share of the workweek, and the jump that came with remote work in 2020 never reversed. Surveys and calendar data disagree on the exact hours, so read each figure with its sample: time spent in meetings looks very different at a tech conference than in a global telemetry average.

Meeting statistics 2026: share of surveyed employees by weekly hours spent in meetings, from 18.9% under 5 hours and 39.7% at 5 to 10 hours to 25.6% at 10 to 20 hours, 10.4% at 20 to 30 hours and 5.4% at 30 or more
Figure 1: Most surveyed employees sit in between 5 and 20 hours of meetings a week, and the tail runs past 30 hours, most of a standard workweek spent on calls and in conference rooms. Source: Reclaim.ai, 2026 SXSW Work Trends Report, Apr 2026. Screenshot of the source page, captured 2 Oct 2026.

How many hours a week do employees spend in meetings?

It depends on who is asked. Self-reported surveys of event attendees and senior staff run well above Microsoft's telemetry, which counts only Teams meeting activity and includes frontline workers.

  • In Reclaim.ai's survey of SXSW 2026 attendees, 65.3% of employees spend 5 to 20 hours a week in meetings and another 15.8% spend more than 20 hours (Reclaim.ai, 2026 SXSW Work Trends Report, Apr 2026).
  • At Google Cloud Next 2026, 69.9% of surveyed attendees spent 10 or more hours a week in meetings and 27.7% spent 20 or more, at least half of a 40-hour week (Reclaim.ai, 2026 Google Cloud Next Deep Work Trends Report, May 2026).
  • US full-time workers have 5 online meetings and 5 face-to-face meetings in an average week, in a survey of 2,000 workers fielded in July 2025 (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, Sep 2025).
  • In a survey of 1,244 US and UK workers, 46% attend three or more work meetings a day: 35% attend three to five, 9% six to ten and 2% more than ten (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).
  • Company size changes the load: 59% of enterprise employees spend five or more hours a week in meetings, against 32% at small and midsize businesses (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).
  • 85% of UK workers spend three or more hours a week in meetings, against 78% of US workers (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).

Calendly's answer options stop at "more than six hours", far below the Reclaim averages. The samples and questions differ, so the two should not be averaged.

  • In Microsoft 365 telemetry, the average employee spends 57% of their time in the apps communicating (meetings, email and chat) and 43% creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations (Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, May 2023).
  • The heaviest meeting users, the top 25% by time in Teams meetings, spend 7.5 hours a week in Teams meetings, a global average that includes frontline workers (Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, May 2023).

Has meeting load grown since 2020?

Yes, measured by meeting count. The number of meetings per week for the average Microsoft Teams user rose 153% from the start of the pandemic to spring 2022 (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Hybrid Work Is Just Work, Sep 2022). That counts meetings only; the 3x figure in the takeaways counts meetings and calls.

Each figure below measures something different: meetings per person, Teams meeting time, meetings plus calls, or attendees. Keep the definition attached to the number.

  • Meetings per person rose 12.9% and attendees per meeting rose 13.5% after the 2020 lockdowns, in calendar data from 3,143,270 users across 16 metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East (NBER Working Paper 27612, DeFilippis et al., Jul 2020).
  • The same study found meetings got 20.1% shorter, so total time in meetings per day fell 11.5% in the post-lockdown period even as the count rose (NBER Working Paper 27612, DeFilippis et al., Jul 2020).
  • The average workday grew 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes, after lockdowns began, and the increase held (NBER Working Paper 27612, DeFilippis et al., Jul 2020).
  • Time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings grew 2.5x globally between February 2020 and February 2021, and the average Teams meeting grew from 35 to 45 minutes (Microsoft Work Trend Index 2021, Mar 2021).

Those two meeting-length findings run in opposite directions. They come from different datasets and windows (calendar metadata in the first lockdown months against a year of Teams data), and neither cancels the other.

  • Double-booking grew too: overlapping meetings per person rose 46% in the year to September 2022, and declined and tentative RSVPs rose 84% and 216% over two years while acceptances grew 3% (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Hybrid Work Is Just Work, Sep 2022).
  • Large meetings with 65 or more attendees are the fastest-growing meeting type in Microsoft 365 telemetry to February 2025 (Microsoft WorkLab, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, Jun 2025).
  • Self-reported meeting time barely moved between Calendly's 2023 and 2024 surveys: the share spending more than six hours a week in meetings went from 22% to 20%, and the share at three to four hours rose from 32% to 37% (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).
  • The share of US workers in 7 to 8 virtual meetings a week rose from 2% in 2024 to 6% in 2025, while the overall average stayed similar (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, Sep 2025).

Do managers and executives spend more time in meetings?

Yes. Meeting time rises with seniority in every study that splits it out, and at the top it takes most of the working day.

How many meetings are unproductive?

Most workers do not object to meetings. They object to meetings with no goal, no agenda and no reason for them to be there, and the unproductive meetings statistics below say that describes most of what is on their calendars.

Share of knowledge workers who say meetings are ineffective, by meeting purpose: brainstorming 75%, making decisions 75%, goal clarity 72%, connecting with colleagues 70%, status updates 70%, driving work forward 67%
Figure 2: Meetings fail at the jobs they are booked for, and no meeting purpose escapes the problem, from status updates to decisions. Source: Atlassian, Workplace Woes: Meetings, Mar 2024. Screenshot of the source page, captured 2 Oct 2026.

What share of meetings do workers call ineffective?

Seven in ten, by workers' own account, and senior managers say the same.

Asked whether meetings help or hurt overall, workers split:

  • 45% of US and UK workers say the time they spend in meetings each week reduces their overall productivity, while 55% say meetings enhance it (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).
  • 81% of workers say more meetings would help them in some way, and only 9% say they are already in too many meetings for that to be possible (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).

Why do meetings go wrong?

Most bad meetings fail before they start: no stated goal, no agenda, the wrong people in the room and technology that eats the first minutes. Then a few voices take over.

  • 62% of workers often attend meetings that do not state a goal in the invite (Atlassian, Workplace Woes: Meetings, Mar 2024).
  • 79% of workers say an agenda leads to more productive meetings (Atlassian, Workplace Woes: Meetings, Mar 2024).
  • 43% of workers say a few people tend to dominate meetings, making it hard to take part (Atlassian, Workplace Woes: Meetings, Mar 2024).
  • Workers name three traits of their least productive meetings, internal and external alike: no follow-up notes, summaries or action items shared afterwards; missing critical attendees, which stalls decisions; and no agenda or pre-reading sent ahead (Calendly, State of Meetings 2024, Jul 2024).
  • 53% of employees feel they need to attend meetings they are invited to even when they are not critical to the agenda, and staff below VP level agree more often than VPs and above (57% vs 49%) (Steven G. Rogelberg, UNC Charlotte, with Otter.ai, Sep 2022).
  • After lost time, the most common hybrid-meeting problems are audio echo or distortion (76%) and not being able to hear everyone (75%) (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, Sep 2025).
  • Workers lose more than six minutes on average just getting a hybrid meeting started, and 27% lose 10 minutes or more per meeting to tech setup (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, Sep 2025).
  • 67% of workers have tried to set up video technology for a meeting, given up and used their laptop instead, and 21% say this happens almost all of the time (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, Sep 2025).
  • 58% of workers say it is difficult to brainstorm in a virtual meeting (Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, May 2023).

How do meetings affect focus time and stress?

Meetings cut the day into pieces too small for deep work, and back-to-back calls add measurable stress. Most SXSW attendees Reclaim.ai surveyed get two or fewer long focus blocks a week.

How much do meetings cost companies?

A meeting's price is mostly payroll: every attendee brings an hourly cost into the room. Meetings that employees say they could skip account for about a third of that spend.

Bar chart of US employer costs per hour worked in June 2026: civilian workers $49.46 total ($33.85 wages, $15.61 benefits), private industry $46.89, state and local government $66.45
Figure 3: The hourly cost of an employee, split into wages and benefits, is the base price of every meeting seat, and benefits make up nearly a third of the total cost. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, Jun 2026. Chart published by the source, captured 2 Oct 2026.

What does an hour of meeting time cost an employer?

Every attendee's wages plus benefits, so the cost scales with headcount and seniority. An hour with a room of managers costs close to twice what the same hour costs with average workers.

How much do unnecessary meetings cost a company?

Tens of thousands of dollars per employee a year, by the only recent per-employee estimate, and far more for managers. The older Doodle figures below come from 2018 data and are best read as a historical benchmark.

  • For managers with four or more direct reports, the yearly meeting investment rises to $124,600 per person, with $42,000 of it on meetings they could skip; for individual contributors earning under $90,000, the figures are $15,800 and $3,500 (Steven G. Rogelberg, UNC Charlotte, with Otter.ai, Sep 2022).
  • A 5,000-person organization with half its staff in non-manager roles spends an estimated $320 million a year on meetings, $101 million of it on attendance that could be cut (Steven G. Rogelberg, UNC Charlotte, with Otter.ai, Sep 2022).
  • Executives are 30% more likely than the average worker to miss deadlines because of too many video calls or meetings, in a survey of 9,615 knowledge workers (Asana, Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023, Mar 2023).
  • Pointless meetings were projected to cost US employers $399 billion in 2019, based on a survey of 6,500 professionals in the US, UK and Germany plus 19 million meetings scheduled through Doodle (Doodle, State of Meetings Report 2019, Jan 2019).
  • Professionals in those three countries spent two hours a week in meetings they considered pointless, which adds up to 13 days a year (Doodle, The State of Meetings 2019, Jan 2019).
  • Across the three countries, 24 billion hours were projected to be lost to pointless meetings in a year (Doodle, The State of Meetings 2019, Jan 2019).
  • 37% of professionals said unnecessary meetings were the biggest cost to their organization, rising to 40% in the UK, against 34% in the US (Doodle, The State of Meetings 2019, Jan 2019).

How much time can companies win back by cutting meetings?

A lot, when the cut is deliberate. Companies that introduced no-meeting days and teams that swapped meetings for recorded video both report large drops in meeting time.

How have remote work and time zones changed meetings?

Hybrid work did not shrink meetings. It moved them onto screens and spread them across the clock, so a 5 pm finish means little to anyone working with colleagues two time zones away. The remote meeting statistics below show where the hours went and what being on camera all day does to people.

Microsoft 365 telemetry: average percent of all meetings by hour of day from 6 am to midnight, peaking at about 14% around 9 am, staying near 8% to 11% through midday, and tapering to a thin tail that runs past 9 pm
Figure 4: Meetings fill the late-morning and early-afternoon hours many people would otherwise use for focused work, and the curve does not stop at 5 pm: a long evening tail runs until close to midnight. The shaded bands are the two daily windows that Microsoft, citing circadian-rhythm research, describes as natural performance spikes for many people; the midday one is the busiest stretch for meetings. Source: Microsoft WorkLab, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, Jun 2025. Chart published by the source, captured 2 Oct 2026.

How many people work remotely or hybrid, and how many meetings are on video?

Most office-type work now runs at least partly through a screen. Few workers go a whole week without a virtual meeting, and among US employees whose jobs can be done remotely, hybrid is the most common arrangement.

Are meetings spreading into evenings and other time zones?

Yes. Meetings still cluster in the core of the day, but Microsoft's telemetry shows late-evening and cross-time-zone meetings both rising, while workers say they want their meeting day to start later and end earlier than it does.

Much of that after-hours traffic is email. Our email statistics cover the inbox side of the same problem.

  • 70% of US workers say a first meeting at 8:00 am or earlier is too early, and 82% prefer meetings to end by 4:00 pm (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, Sep 2025).
  • 74% of US knowledge workers say they do at least some work on Sundays (including 18% who rarely do), and 21% say it amounts to a full or near-full workday (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2026, Sep 2026).
  • Among the causes of meeting fatigue, 23% of US knowledge workers point to meetings scheduled too early or too late (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2026, Sep 2026).

Is video-call fatigue real?

Yes, and researchers can measure it. Peer-reviewed studies tie fatigue to more, longer and back-to-back video meetings and to keeping the camera on, and women report more of it than men.

  • 38% of US knowledge workers say they suffer from meeting fatigue, most often because meetings run too long (45%), there are too many overall (41%) or they could have been an email (39%) (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2026, Sep 2026).
  • In hybrid meetings, 61% of US knowledge workers say they feel disengaged and 58% say they have difficulty contributing to the conversation (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2026, Sep 2026).
  • 26% of workers who often use video calls say they are worn out by the time they spend on them, while 74% say the amount is fine (Pew Research Center, No sign of widespread Zoom fatigue, May 2022).
  • Stanford researchers built the Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale from 49 candidate items down to 15, found five kinds of video-call fatigue (general, social, emotional, visual and motivational), and in a validation study of 2,724 respondents linked more frequent, longer and more back-to-back meetings to higher fatigue (Fauville et al., Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Aug 2021).
  • In a survey of 9,787 people, those who used video calls more often, for longer and with fewer breaks reported more fatigue, and women reported more fatigue than men because they felt mirror anxiety and other nonverbal strains more strongly (Fauville et al., Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Feb 2023).
  • Virtual-meeting fatigue was 14.9% higher for women than for men and 11.1% higher for Asian than for White participants in a panel of 613 adults, a gap explained by dissatisfaction with one's own face on screen (Ratan, Miller and Bailenson, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Nov 2021).
  • In a four-week field experiment with 103 employees and 1,408 daily observations, keeping the camera on in virtual meetings raised daily fatigue, more so for women and newer employees, and fatigue lowered how much people spoke up and engaged (Shockley et al., Journal of Applied Psychology, Aug 2021).
  • Across two surveys of 3,920 people, longer and more frequent video meetings left people feeling less socially connected and more fatigued, and participants rated their own social skills lower on video than in person (Queiroz et al., Computers in Human Behavior, Sep 2023).

What happens to decisions and notes after a meeting?

Meetings end with unclear owners about half the time, and memory research shows unrehearsed material fades fastest in the first hour. The surveys below show the gap at the end of the call; the lab studies are an analogy for what happens next, not a measure of meeting recall.

Forgetting curves from Ebbinghaus (1880) and three replications (Mack, Seitz, Dros), showing normalized relearning savings falling from 1.0 at 20 minutes to about 0.75 at 1 hour, about 0.58 to 0.67 at 1 day and 0.1 to 0.5 at 31 days, on a log time scale
Figure 5: Four forgetting curves measured more than a century apart all lose about a quarter of their relearning savings for nonsense-syllable lists within the first hour, the steepest part of the curve. Source: Murre and Dros, PLOS ONE, Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve, Jul 2015. Chart published by the source (CC BY 4.0), captured 2 Oct 2026.

How many meetings end without clear next steps?

About half, by workers' own account, in large surveys from both Atlassian and Microsoft. Many meetings end by scheduling another meeting instead of a decision.

How much of a meeting do people forget?

Much of it, and most of the loss comes in the first hour. Memory research cannot say what share of a meeting any one person forgets, but it shows how quickly unrehearsed material fades. In the studies below, "savings" is the share of learning time saved when relearning, not the share of content remembered.

  • In Ebbinghaus's original 1880 experiment, relearning a list saved 58% of the original learning time after 20 minutes, 44% after 1 hour and 34% after 1 day (Murre and Dros, PLOS ONE, Jul 2015).
  • A 2015 replication, in which one subject spent 70 hours learning and relearning lists, found savings of 47% after 20 minutes, 37% after 1 hour and 32% after 1 day (Murre and Dros, PLOS ONE, Jul 2015).
  • After 31 days, savings in the replication had fallen to 4%, against 21% in Ebbinghaus's original data (Murre and Dros, PLOS ONE, Jul 2015).
  • A meta-analysis of 64 studies (75 effect sizes) found that groups recalling together remember less than the same people recalling alone and pooling their answers, and the gap grows in larger groups (Marion and Thorley, Psychological Bulletin, Sep 2016).

When the record is missing, people go looking for it, often by booking yet another meeting:

  • Teams spend a quarter of the workweek searching for information, which adds up to 2.4 billion hours a year across the Fortune 500, in a survey of 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 Fortune 1000 executives (Atlassian, State of Teams 2025, Mar 2025).
  • 56% of workers say the only way to get the information they need is often to ask someone or schedule a meeting (Atlassian, State of Teams 2025, Mar 2025).
  • 43% of knowledge workers say they could work faster if the information they need were easier to find, the top answer on Atlassian's list (Atlassian, State of Teams 2025, Mar 2025).
  • 62% of workers say they struggle with too much time spent searching for information during the workday (Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, May 2023).

How do people take notes in meetings?

Unevenly, and the people who skip the meeting depend on whoever took them. Workers want short notes with decisions, dates and owners within a day, and lab studies show that how notes are taken changes what ends up in them.

That preference sets the bar for any meeting transcription app: employees want the decisions, dates and owners, and a raw transcript is not enough on its own.

  • In three studies, students who took notes on laptops did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote longhand, because laptop users tended to transcribe lectures word for word (Mueller and Oppenheimer, Psychological Science, Apr 2014).
  • A 2021 direct replication with 142 participants (74 on laptops, 68 longhand) again found that laptop note-takers wrote more words overall and more of the lecturer's words verbatim (Urry et al., Psychological Science, Feb 2021).
  • The same replication found no quiz advantage for longhand notes, a result echoed in exploratory meta-analyses of eight similar studies (Urry et al., Psychological Science, Feb 2021).
  • In a Stanford lab study of 48 participants, speech input on a phone was 2.93 times faster than the keyboard in English (153 vs 52 words per minute) and 2.87 times faster in Mandarin (123 vs 43) (Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay, Stanford University, Jan 2018).
  • Speech made fewer errors during entry than the keyboard (5.30% vs 11.22% corrected error rate) but left slightly more errors in the final text (1.30% vs 0.79%) (Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay, Stanford University, Jan 2018).

How fast are workers adopting AI meeting notes?

Adoption is broad but shallow. Most workers have tried AI, far fewer use it daily, and meeting help sits mid-table among the jobs they hand it, which leaves it room to grow.

AI meeting notes adoption: share of US employees who use AI at work for each task, Q2 2026. Writing and editing 51%, search or research 49%, general assistance 39%, knowledge management 31%, email or communication 29%, meeting assistance or transcription 19%, then data analytics, slides, media generation, coding, task management and automation at 16% to 18%
Figure 6: Meeting help ranks sixth of twelve uses, behind writing, search, general problem-solving, knowledge management and email, so it has room to climb as more people move from occasional to daily AI use. Source: Gallup, Organizational AI Adoption Jumps Six Points, Jul 2026 (data collected May 2026). Chart published by the source, captured 2 Oct 2026.

How many workers use AI at work, and for meetings?

About half of US employees use AI at work at least occasionally, but daily use is still a minority habit, and meeting help ranks sixth of twelve uses among AI users.

What do Zoom and Microsoft report about AI meeting features?

Paid AI meeting features are growing several times faster than the platforms that sell them. Zoom's AI Companion and My Notes user counts are climbing while its revenue grows in single digits, and Microsoft, whose Copilot is a general assistant rather than a meeting tool, added paid Copilot seats more than twice as fast as in the prior quarter.

  • Zoom My Notes, its AI note taker for virtual and in-person meetings, reached 1.5 million licensed users within four months of launch (Zoom, Q1 FY2027 results, May 2026).
  • Zoom's total revenue grew 5.5% year over year to $1,239.0 million in the quarter ended April 30, 2026 (Zoom, Q1 FY2027 results, May 2026).
  • In the quarter ended July 31, 2026, Zoom's revenue grew 4.9% to $1,277.2 million, and the release gave no update on AI Companion or My Notes user counts (Zoom, Q2 FY2027 results, Aug 2026).
  • Net new paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats more than doubled from the previous quarter, while paid Microsoft 365 Commercial seats grew 6% year over year (Microsoft, FY26 Q4 earnings call, Jul 2026).
  • Conversations per Microsoft 365 Copilot user nearly doubled year over year, and Copilot's average weekly engagement is now on par with Outlook and Teams (Microsoft, FY26 Q4 earnings call, Jul 2026).

How are doctors and other professionals using AI transcription?

Doctors have moved fastest. Ambient AI scribes, which listen to a visit and draft the clinical note, were the one AI use case every surveyed health system was working on, and early studies associate them with modest time savings. These are observational and pre-post studies: they show associations, not proof that a tool caused the change.

  • The average US physician now uses 2.3 AI use cases, up from 1.1 in 2023, in a survey of 1,692 physicians fielded in January and February 2026 (American Medical Association, 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence, Mar 2026).
  • 28% of US physicians use AI to document billing codes, medical charts or visit notes, up from 21% in 2024, and 28% use it to generate chart summaries, up from 12% (American Medical Association, 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence, Mar 2026).
  • Ambient notes were the only AI use case in which all 43 responding US health systems reported adoption activity, and 53% reported a high degree of success using AI for clinical documentation (Poon et al., JAMIA, May 2025).
  • In a study of 8,581 clinicians at 5 US academic medical centers, adopting an AI scribe was associated with 13.4 fewer minutes of EHR time and 16.0 fewer minutes of documentation time per 8 hours of scheduled patient care, while after-hours EHR time did not change significantly (Rotenstein et al., JAMA, Apr 2026).
  • Among 263 ambulatory clinicians in 6 US health systems, the share reporting burnout fell from 51.9% to 38.8% after 30 days of using an ambient AI scribe, in a pre-post study without a control group (Olson et al., JAMA Network Open, Oct 2025).
  • Microsoft says its healthcare AI automated 28 million patient encounters in the quarter ended June 30, 2026, twice as many as a year earlier, and is on pace for more than 100 million in calendar 2026 (Microsoft, FY26 Q4 earnings call, Jul 2026).

Outside medicine, professionals in other fiduciary fields use AI tools often:

  • 74% of legal, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, risk and global trade professionals say they use AI tools several times a week, and 44% rely on them multiple times a day, in a survey of more than 1,800 professionals across 62 countries (Thomson Reuters Institute, Future of Professionals 2026, Jun 2026).

Methodology and Sources

Every statistic on this page was traced to the organization that produced the data: US government agencies (BLS), peer-reviewed journals and working papers, company earnings releases, and companies that ran their own surveys or measured their own platforms (Microsoft, Atlassian, Owl Labs, Calendly, Reclaim.ai, Gallup, Pew Research Center, Asana, Doodle, Thomson Reuters Institute and the AMA). We do not cite statistics roundups or vendor blogs that repeat other people's numbers. Each link was opened on 2 October 2026 to confirm the page loads, the number appears on it and the date is right. Survey figures are self-reported and telemetry figures are measured, so the two are never combined into one claim, and vendor surveys are named with their samples where the publisher states one (Reclaim.ai's event surveys give no exact sample size). The page is refreshed monthly, and fast-moving figures such as AI adoption and after-hours meeting data are replaced first.

Glossary

  • WTI: Microsoft Work Trend Index, Microsoft's annual and special reports on work, built from surveys and Microsoft 365 telemetry.
  • Telemetry: usage data measured by software (here, anonymized Microsoft 365 and Teams signals), as opposed to what people report in surveys.
  • NBER: National Bureau of Economic Research, a US nonprofit that publishes economics working papers.
  • ECEC: Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, the BLS release on hourly wage and benefit costs.
  • BLS: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • OEWS: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, the BLS survey of wages by occupation.
  • ATUS: American Time Use Survey, the BLS survey of how Americans spend their day.
  • CPS: Current Population Survey, the monthly household survey behind US employment data.
  • Ad hoc meeting: a call started without a calendar invite.
  • EEG: electroencephalogram, a recording of electrical activity in the brain.
  • Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale: a 15-item questionnaire that measures fatigue from video calls.
  • Ambient AI scribe: software that listens to a clinical visit and drafts the note for the clinician to review.
  • EHR: electronic health record.
  • FY: fiscal year.

Sources

Cite this page

Every figure here links to the study that produced it. Quote any of them with a link to this page or the original source.

WriteVoice. "155 Meeting Statistics October 2026." WriteVoice, October 2026. https://www.writevoice.io/statistics/meeting-statistics/
<a href="https://www.writevoice.io/statistics/meeting-statistics/">Meeting Statistics</a> (WriteVoice, October 2026)
  • Email Statistics Email users, emails sent per day, spam share, emails per worker, time spent on email, reply times, after-hours overload and AI drafting.
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