In my twenties, I used to be excited when I was invited to meetings. I assumed an invitation meant something important was about to happen: real discussion, meaningful decisions, and a chance to witness or even contribute to work that mattered.
Over time, I learned a harder truth: for people working in corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies around the world, meetings are often the most dreaded item on the calendar.
I saw that frustration recently as people stood up from a half-day meeting that had promised everything and accomplished almost nothing. The sense of wasted time was written plainly on their faces.
That feeling has a number attached to it now. A recent workplace survey found that 51% of employees would be comfortable sending an AI avatar to attend meetings on their behalf. Not taking notes for them. Not summarizing afterward. Standing in for them, in the room, because the meeting itself isn’t worth a human being’s attention.
Sit with that for a second. We’ve reached the point where more than half the workforce has quietly concluded that their presence in a meeting adds nothing a well-trained algorithm couldn’t fake. Seventy-one percent of senior leaders say their meetings are unproductive or inefficient. Eighty percent of employees say they’d be more effective with fewer of them. The average knowledge worker is losing over a hundred hours a year to meetings nobody particularly wanted to be in.
I don’t read any of that as an argument against meetings. I read it as an argument against unfacilitated ones.
Every one of those statistics describes the same failure: a gathering with no clear purpose, no one accountable for what happens in the room, and no structure guiding the group toward an outcome. Take away the video call and the calendar invite, and you’d get the same disengagement in a conference room in 1995. The format isn’t the problem. The absence of design is.
This is exactly the gap facilitation exists to close, and it’s why I think our field matters more now, not less. When an organization starts asking whether a meeting is worth a human’s time, the honest answer usually isn’t “cancel it.” It’s “someone needs to actually design it.” A clear purpose. The right people, and only the right people. A process for getting to a decision instead of a conversation that circles until the calendar runs out. Someone in the room whose job is the group’s outcome, not their own opinion of it.
That’s not a scheduling fix. It’s a skill, the skill our credentialing pathway exists to build, from the fundamentals of virtual and in-person facilitation through Certified Master Facilitator, and through Certified Facilitative Leader for the people who need to run this inside their own organizations rather than at the front of a periodic workshop.
So here’s the reframe I’d offer this month: the 51% who’d rather send an avatar aren’t rejecting collaboration. They’re rejecting meetings that never earned their attention in the first place. Give them one that’s actually been facilitated, and I’d bet that number looks very different.
Diana Gurwicz, CMF®, MBA, SHRM-SCP, CCMP
Chairperson, INIFAC