Employees across the UK are spending too much time on menial tasks such as sending emails, updating the status of tasks and having unnecessary meetings.

New research from work management platform Asana shows that 61% of knowledge workers (including accountants, editors and programmers) spend too much time doing 'work about work'. In 2021, an estimated 134 hours were spent in avoidable meetings and calls, whilst another 107 hours were spent redoing work.

Over a third (36%) of those surveyed said they spent more time on emails compared to 12 months ago, whilst over half admitted to multitasking during virtual meetings, suggesting that meetings were distracting from important work.

Asana's head of international, Simon O'Kane, believes businesses need to find more efficient ways to communicate with their teams. He said:

"In our fundamentally changed and ever-changing working world, ‘work about work’ is absorbing far too much of workers’ time. It still remains a challenge which needs to be addressed. Unnecessary meetings are a major contributing factor to this. It is time for business leaders to look beyond what they might have traditionally done and find new ways of collaborating with and aligning their teams."

O'Kane suggested that employees providing updates remotely could help cut down on unnecessary meetings. He added:

"In order to combat these alarming trends, business leaders should prioritise encouraging teams to share asynchronous updates rather than defaulting to meetings as a catch-all for team alignment. Organisations must also set clear guidelines on what constitutes a meeting instead of an email or other forms of asynchronous communication. By providing training on how to run a meeting effectively and efficiently when it is genuinely required, everyone will have a benchmark to follow."