(Credit: René Ramos; totojang1977/Shutterstock.com)
Time is money, and at work, human energy is money, too. That's part of the reason meetings are expensive. Every meeting also comes with a setup cost. And after a meeting, people need time to wind down and reflect before they go back to being productive—more time, more money.
Meetings should be treated like a precious commodity. By breaking down the costs of a meeting, you might start to see them that way and treat them as such.
How Much Does a Meeting Cost in Time?
Have you ever punched the numbers to estimate how much a meeting costs in terms of people's time? As an example, I might make a very rough estimate and say that the average salary of all the people in a particular meeting is $100,000 per year. Based on that figure, one hour of one person's time is $48. If you have six people in a one-hour meeting, that's $288.
But that's not entirely accurate, and it's not the complete picture, either.
A One-Hour Meeting Is Not One Hour of Time
A one-hour meeting takes, conservatively, about an hour and 15 minutes of every person's time. Before joining a virtual meeting, people need 1 to 5 minutes to wrap up their work, get ready for the meeting, and log in. After a meeting ends, people need a break before they get back to work, which I estimate at 10 to 12 minutes.
I've long held that most one-hour meetings are too long to begin with. You don't get an hour's worth of work out of a one-hour meeting. You might only be getting 40 minutes' worth of "work" or productive time from attendees. That's 20 minutes of lost time.
Add that lost time to the time spent decompressing after the meeting, and it could mean that a one-hour meeting costs each individual 30 minutes.
Additional Setup Costs: Scheduling, Agenda, and Orientation
The few minutes people use to prepare to join a meeting isn't the only setup cost. In a best-case scenario, someone schedules the meeting and writes an agenda. Maybe that takes a few minutes of one or two people's time. That cost is not huge.
What's worse is when there isn't an agenda. When people come to a meeting unclear about its purpose or how they're expected to participate, you lose even more time. And it's not just, oh, a few minutes at the start to orient everyone. The entirety of the meeting may lose value (and therefore have a higher cost) by being inefficient. More time is spent getting less accomplished.
Speaking of purpose and efficiency, what happens when a meeting doesn't have a clear outcome or next steps? The cost of a meeting can increase exponentially if people leave more confused than when they arrived.
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How to Keep the Cost of a Meeting Down
When we think about how much a meeting can cost and what factors drive those costs up, we can be more conscientious and intentional about how we plan, host, and attend meetings.
Because the way we treat meetings at work is a product of organizational culture, the practices and habits come from the top down. So if you're in a management or leadership position, the way you organize, host, and attend meetings matters tremendously. Here are a few tips for keeping your costs minimal:
Only invite people to a meeting if they need to be there.
Always have a clear written agenda that you send to attendees in advance.
If attendees are expected to participate in a meeting, say so in your agenda.
When a high amount of participation is expected, give people a place to participate asynchronously, somewhere they can write down ideas and read about the topic before, during, and after the meeting.
Never schedule a meeting for longer than it needs to be.
Rarely schedule meetings to go longer than 45 minutes, and if you do, include a break.
For large meetings, assign a time-keeper to give a five-minute warning before the end of the scheduled meeting time.
When appropriate, assign someone to take notes at a meeting and keep track of assigned actions.
For more tips, see my advice for making meetings more accessible and how to waste less time in meetings.
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