What does a meetingreally cost?

Meetings are both an enigma and a blessing. Depends on its context, how you look at it and when it occurs. On a human level, I enjoy the opportunity to connect with my fellow colleagues to discuss important decisions, creative ideas, or sometimes just to spend a few minutes to talk about life before moving to work topics.

Sometimes however, I’ll attend a meeting and reflect; was that really a good use of my time? Did we actually agree on next steps or has the tin can been kicked further down the road again? Sound familiar? It’s impossible to always have progressive, productive meetings, if that is your aim and you find a way to achieve it, get in touch because I’d love to know how!

The real skill is finding ways to condense your meetings in such a way that the number of unproductive ones are few and far between. This is not something you’ll be able to achieve overnight, but as the saying goes, a little goes a long way. I’ll be walking you through some techniques to help you with that as we reflect on how meetings affect different areas of the business in different ways.

If you run finance, you track every software licence and every travel claim. The biggest cost in most meetings, the time of the people in the room, comes out of salaries and never shows up as a line of its own.

Below: how much time meetings take, how much of it people say they could skip, a simple CMI method for weighing costs against benefits, and where Time OS cuts the hours. There’s a calculator at the end for your own team.

More than most budgets assume. In 2022, organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg surveyed 632 employees across more than 20 industries for Otter.ai. The average person had 17.7 meetings a week, adding up to 18 hours, which is close to half a standard working week. Managers with four or more direct reports had 21.3 meetings, taking 22.2 hours.

Most of those invites get a yes by default. People said they’d like to turn down almost a third of the invitations they receive, and in practice they decline 14%.

What stands out to me is how little of this is a choice. People say yes to most invites out of habit, so the meeting load grows without anyone deciding it should. For a finance team, that’s a cost that keeps rising with nobody signing it off.

Source: Rogelberg for Otter.ai, The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance, 2022

Rogelberg’s report turned those hours into money. It took each person’s self-reported salary, worked out an hourly rate, and applied it to their meeting hours. On that basis, the average employee’s meeting time was worth about $80,300 a year, and the time in meetings they could have skipped about $25,400.

For an organization of 100 people, the report puts the cost of skippable meeting time at about $2.5 million a year.

Treat these as estimates. They’re modelled from what people reported about their salaries and their week, the sample leans towards professional services, and most respondents were in the US. The method is still the useful part, because you can run it on your own figures.

For me, this is the moment meeting time becomes visible. Once you multiply hours by salary, it starts to look like any other budget line you’d review, and you can ask the same questions of it.

Source: Rogelberg for Otter.ai, The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance, 2022

The Chartered Management Institute’s template for making decisions with cost-benefit analysis has four steps. Identify the costs and estimate the benefits, add up the totals, work out the net figure, then look at the result alongside the things money doesn’t capture. Pick a step to see it applied to a recurring meeting.

When I run a recurring meeting through these four steps, the honest answer is often to keep it, only shorter and with fewer people. Step 4 is the one finance teams tend to skip, and it’s the one that stops a sensible cut from turning into a morale problem.

Source: CMI, Making decisions using cost-benefit analysis (template)

In the hours themselves. Three settings take out low-value meeting time without anyone having to police calendars.

1. 1.Meeting limits. Cap how many meetings can be booked in a day, so calendars can’t fill up by default.
2. 2.Group polls. When a meeting exists only to agree a time, send a few options and let people vote. Nobody needs an account.
3. 3.Focus time and buffers. Focus time with auto-decline protects blocks for real work, and buffers stop back-to-back meetings running into each other.

Does Time OS put a price on meetings?

No. The calculator below runs only on the figures you enter. Time OS works on the hours: it caps them, moves them and replaces some of them with a poll.

In my view, this is where finance and operations meet. You set the rule once, the calendar holds it, and the saving shows up as hours people get back for the work you’re paying them to do.

Put in your own team. The numbers below are examples, with meeting hours taken from the Rogelberg survey, so change them to match yours. Results are in the same currency as the salary you enter.

Where do you start?

1. 1.Pick your three biggest recurring meetings. Run each one through the four CMI steps.
2. 2.Set meeting limits. Agree a daily cap with each team lead.
3. 3.Move scheduling to polls. Anything held only to find a time can go to a group poll.

Even if your numbers come in well below the survey’s, the total is rarely small. It’s money you already spend, so every hour you take out goes straight back into the work.