Business Pros Waste Five Hours a Week Arranging Meetings

ZURICH, Switzerland - Meeting Inefficiencies Cost National Economies Billions Each Year and More Than Half the Working Week

Managers and administrative professionals burn an eighth of their working week arranging meetings and conference calls according to research released today. Doodle, the leading online scheduling tool and author of the survey, believes workers could “reclaim Friday afternoon” and companies can save costs by working smarter when arranging meetings.

Doodle estimates that the time spent arranging meetings each year equates to thousands of Euros of a manager’s and an administrative professional’s salary. With some million managers and admin pros in the national economies of Europe or the US this equates to a total annual economic cost of several billion US-Dollar per annum in spent wages.

“We could take a half day off every Friday with the time saved on meeting arrangement by using simple online tools that do it much quicker and more reliable,” Näf said. Doodle is a simple-to-use, free online tool that helps organisations and individuals save time organising meetings by offering a transparent view of everyone’s preferred choices.

The key findings from the survey: - Business professionals need 4.9 hours to organise seven meetings a week on average. - Most meetings have at least four or five participants, meaning four- and five-way ‘reply-all’ email strings to arrange them - this is a lot of emails if firms don’t use online scheduling tools. - Across Europe and the US administrative staff use calendar systems (34 per cent) more than managers (27 per cent). Meanwhile managers prefer email (34 per cent) to arrange meetings over administrative staff (30 per cent).

You can get the full report and charts here (in English and German): doodle.com/about/mediareleases/survey.html.

About the Survey

2,500 administrative and management staff from UK, US, France, Germany and the Nordic region (500 from each) were questioned by LMRMC. For full report and charts see: doodle.com/about/mediareleases/survey.html!

About Doodle

Doodle is a free online scheduling service and makes it easy to find the right time for a group gathering or a meeting. Doodle has more than 3 million unique users monthly. In Doodle’s home country, Switzerland, 10 per cent of the entire population use the service at least once a month, and this figure is also growing.

Press Contacts Tilman Eberle Vice President of PR and Communications www.doodle.com www.doodle.com/press Email: the@doodle.com Telephone: +41-44-586-98-14

Source: Doodle

Press contacts: Tilman Eberle, Vice President of PR and Communications, Email: the at doodle.com, Telephone: +41-44-586-98-14