MSPs, Your Clients Have a Meeting Problem - Now You Have the Fix.

There’s a silent drain on your clients’ productivity - and it’s happening in their calendars.

While meetings are intended to drive alignment and collaboration, new research shows they’re one of the biggest culprits behind employee fatigue, lost time, and disengagement. But because meeting culture is such a normal part of work, most companies don’t know how bad the problem really is—or how to measure it.

That’s where Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can help. And no, you don’t need to become a productivity coach to make a difference. You already support the tech stack that throws off the data that can illustrate the problem. You just need to help your clients see it.

The Meetings Problem

A wave of research has confirmed what employees have felt for years:

• Professionals spend over 11 hours per week in meetings, often exceeding 30% of their workweek (Fast Company, 2024).
• 71% of meetings are considered unproductive, costing U.S. companies $37 billion annually (Harvard Business Review, 2024).
• Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that inefficient meetings are the #1 barrier to productivity in hybrid environments (HBR, June 2024).
• A 2025 New York Post article dubbed the lingering cognitive drain from back-to-back meetings “meeting hangovers”—where the fatigue lasts hours after the calls end.
• A ScienceDirect meta-analysis (2025) identified “feeling trapped” in meetings as a key psychological cause of Zoom fatigue.

These aren’t isolated studies—they paint a consistent picture: meeting overload is real, it's widespread, and it's measurable.

Why Should MSPs Get Involved?

Because your clients can’t fix what they can’t see—and the data that reveals the problem is flowing through the platforms you already manage.

You support Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Teams, Zoom, and Slack. These tools generate logs of every calendar invite, every recurring meeting, and every video call. With the right visualization tools, you can help your clients:

• Quantify average time in meetings (internal and external) per employee, team, or department
• Identify departments or roles experiencing the highest meeting density
• Track trends over time to support reinforcing changes like reducing recurring calls

You're not stepping outside your lane—you're helping clients optimize what they already use. Your job is to provide the data points.

How to Start the Conversation

We get it—talking about productivity might feel like unfamiliar territory. But the pitch here isn’t “let’s fix your culture”—it’s:

“We can show you how meetings are actually impacting your employee’s workdays using the data you already own in the systems we manage.”

Here are a few ways to ease into the conversation during your next QBR or sync:

• “We’re seeing a lot of teams lose hours each week to unproductive meetings—would you be open to looking at your organization’s calendar data to identify inefficiencies?”
• “Your platforms can show you where time is going across Teams, Zoom, and Outlook. We can help you surface that.”
• “This isn’t about cutting meetings—it’s about making them count. Let’s start by seeing how much time meetings actually take so you have a data set that you can use to track how much progress your teams are making.”

And if they need MORE convincing? Just point to the research:

• “A 2025 study found that time in meetings is one of the strongest predictors of burnout—stronger than workload itself.”

What the Data Reveals (and Why It Matters)

Here’s what your clients can track in Produce8 as part of the really inexpensive Essentials package:

• Average meetings per day/week per employee (anonymous)
• Time in internal vs external meetings
• Time spent in meetings vs. time blocked on calendars
• Time in virtual calling systems (potentially ad-hoc meetings)
• Trends in meeting time by role or department or companywide

Once clients see this data, they can begin experimenting with the vast number of initiatives that can help tackle the problem - reducing redundant calls, switching to async check-ins, and protecting focus time. With your help they can measure the impact of those changes at a high level and in a really simple way.

From Tech Partner to Strategic Advisor

As an MSP, you already help clients modernize and manage the platforms where digital work happens. Now, you can also help them optimize how that work gets done.

By helping clients understand their meeting overload problem you become more than a support provider. You become a strategic ally in solving a problem that affects every knowledge worker on their payroll.

And the best part? You don’t have to fix the problem yourself. You just have to help them see it. You can stay in your lane on technology conversations, but now you can talk about the impact of tech on the workday.

Reach Out

If you are interested in what Produce8 can do to position your MSP as an advisor to companies that wish to transform digital workplaces, please reach out to our team for a quick demo.