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Tax-Funded Study Finds Bureaucrats Spend 40% of Day in Meetings About Meetings
OTTAWA – A federally funded research project has concluded that the average federal bureaucrat spends 40% of their workday attending meetings whose primary purpose is to schedule other meetings. The study, which cost taxpayers $2.3 million, was conducted over three years and involved 1,200 participants.
Our research shows a clear pattern of meeting recursion, explained the lead researcher. A typical employee attends a morning stand-up to discuss what they will work on, a mid-day progress sync to discuss what they did in the morning, and an afternoon debrief to discuss what happened in the mid-day sync. That is before any actual work is done.
The study recommends reducing meeting time by 50%, a recommendation that will be discussed at a series of meetings beginning next month. A follow-up study to study the effectiveness of the recommendation has already been funded at a cost of $850,000.
The study itself was peer-reviewed by three other government-funded researchers who were unavailable for comment as they were in meetings.
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