Nearly two-thirds of Irish employees think that virtual work meetings are a waste of time, according to research carried out by job site CV-Library.

Online work meetings have become the new norm in recent weeks thanks to the Covid-19 lockdown. However, a CV-Library survey of 1,000 working professionals found that most don’t care for digital meetings, while one in five will find excuses to leave an online meeting if they get bored.

Other findings from the survey showed that half of respondents regarded the most productive meetings as those lasting less than 30 minutes. Males, meanwhile, are most likely to regard digital meetings as a waste of time and are more likely than females to abandon an online meeting altogether.

Some 93% of Irish workers currently have up to four virtual meetings a day, with each of these lasting around one hour. One in eight employees said they currently spend around 5.5 hours every day in virtual meetings.

Lee Biggins, founder and CEO of CV-Library, said that while conference calls and video chats can keep a company’s momentum going, they can also be counter-productive if they take too much time or fail to generate positivity.

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“Try to get a good balance of personal and professional chat. It doesn’t need to be business all the time. For some people, virtual meetings may be all the interaction they have with others right now, so be sensitive of everyone’s situations,” Biggins added.

Online meeting software developers such as Zoom have seen user figures and sales soar over the last month as Covid-19 restrictions were put in place globally.

Zoom’s daily active users jumped to more than 200 million through March, compared with a previous high of 10 million. Microsoft has also recorded exponential user growth for its Teams collaboration platform, which had 44 million users globally at the end of March, up 37% when compared with user figures at the start of the month.