90% Of Conference Calls Spent Finding Out If Everyone’s There Yet

Business News: The majority of conferences calls are spent finding out if everyone else due on the call has successfully joined yet, a new study has found.

The shocking statistics come from research by the Federation of Small Businesses, who also report that the initial ten minutes of most conference calls involve someone sitting on their own in a room, intermittently yelling “Hello, is anyone there yet?” into the phone.

The study suggests that the rest of the call is taken up by people apologising for taking so long to log in, or just repeating their names over and over again in the hope that a distant voice will stop asking if everyone’s there yet.

“Conference Call Ineptitude – or CCI – is causing serious problems for businesses across the UK,” said a FSB spokesman.

“Literally thousands of hours are wasted each year by managers on pointless conference calls. The rest of the hours are wasted by them coming up with stupid acronyms to irritate the people in the office who actually do some work.”