The Hidden Cost of Meeting… and Not Meeting

Dan Rutledge

Co-founder & CEO of Meetify

Meetings have always been part of work life. But these days, initiating a meeting is easier than ever with video conferencing options that bypass geography and scheduling tools that make it quick to set up.

The result? More meetings.

In fact, a study from Microsoft showed that workers are averaging 150 percent more meetings today than in 2020. A Harvard Business study found that the average worker now has five to eight more virtual meetings per week than in 2020.

That is a huge shift. Do you know the real cost of your meetings?

My Wake-Up Call on the Cost of Meetings

I never went to business school. Before becoming CEO of SignUpGenius, I had worked as an hourly freelance developer for about fifteen years. Working hourly really changes you. You become keenly aware that the half-day you spend doing the budget or troubleshooting a computer problem is not bringing in revenue that puts food on the table.

It’s not the healthiest mindset, honestly, but for better or worse, over time you start obsessively thinking of time monetarily. Every single minute is money.

How to Calculate the Cost of a Meeting

When Angel and I started running SignUpGenius, we unknowingly brought that mindset into how we ran the company. As the company grew, we became particularly concerned about meetings. In the beginning, money was tight. We recognized that having a whole company meeting was a big deal.

In fact, one time we calculated the exact cost.

If you want to know how much a meeting costs, take everyone’s salary, break it down by the hours they work to get their hourly rate, then combine all those hourly rates together. You might be shocked at the total.

Once you see that number on paper and you truly recognize the expense and value of a meeting, it sharpens you.

1. You make sure you know the exact purpose of the meeting.

2. You cancel a meeting unless you can come fully prepared.

3. You start changing your meeting agendas to handle only the highest value items.

4. You make sure to run the meeting well and end early or on time.

Building a Culture Around Productive Meetings

We also worked to build a company culture around meetings. We kept meetings short. We played around with different times and time blocking to optimize them. We made loose rules for when people could interrupt you and when they couldn’t to have a meeting.

You don’t spend money without budgeting or planning for it or having a reason for it. Why would you handle time that way?

You can’t just let anyone schedule meetings whenever they want. Train people. Guide people. Build a strategy. You don’t spend money without budgeting or planning for it or having a reason for it. Why would you handle time that way?

The Meetings That Are Missing

Now, the irony is, while we seem to be creating too many group meetings and inviting people who are not needed, we are also not having the small meetings that sometimes are absolutely necessary.

And there is a huge cost there too.

How many times has this happened to you? You get a long email from someone about a project that is going poorly. Explanations are needed. Passive aggressive comments are made. People are CC’d. You then spend an hour crafting a delicate reply to this person and the group.

Other people chime in, writing their own long responses. Without blinking, collectively you have spent maybe six work-hours in back-and-forth emails.

Sometimes that email really does need to be a meeting! Get together face to face if possible and handle these delicate relational issues. Your six hours might be resolved in fifteen minutes.

Face to Face Still Matters

I recently read the book Difficult Conversations, from the Harvard Negotiation Project. One of their key insights was that, with basically no exceptions, difficult conversations are best handled face to face. No texts. No emails. No phone calls.

And like it or not, doing hard work requires hard conversations… frequently. The cost of avoiding these meetings is fractured relationships and pent-up resentment that breaks down teams or at the very least makes them work sub-optimally for their goals.

Sometimes you cannot afford not to meet.

Get Serious

The bottom line is that human interaction and meeting together is ridiculously important, incredibly expensive, and absolutely critical to accomplishing the world changing missions of our organizations and companies. If you’re not taking meetings seriously, then you’re not considering the cost.

Who. When. Where. Schedule in person meetings with ease using Meetify.

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