Have you ever been sitting in a meeting thinking that it is a pointless waste of time?
“Why am I here,” you may ask yourself.
And even worse, a meeting often takes the place of very important work that you could be doing. You even could be doing tasks that would significantly help your company. Maybe even make your company money.
But instead, you are sitting in this boring meeting.
Honestly, we’ve all been there. As a matter of fact, I am sitting in one of those meetings right now. Depending on your corporate culture, you may even go to dozens of these meetings per month. Not only is this bad for you and your morale, but, as they say in the movie “Office Space,” it isn’t even good for the company.
However, what can you do? Meetings may be evil, but they’re a “necessary evil.”
Right … ?
Cost of a meeting
Sometimes, when I want to change something, I’ll try to present a case using numbers. And the number that many companies care about the most is money. So what is the cost of a meeting? Let’s find out with a small case study:
- Number of employees in the meeting: 20
- Average salary per employee: $50,000
- Average benefit cost per employee: $10,000
- Length of meeting: 2 hours
In 2015, the average employee worked 1,811 hours according to a Pew analysis of Labor Department Data. This means that the average employee in our case study makes $33.13 per hour, including benefits.
By doing a little bit of math, I found out that this 2 hour meeting costs $1,325!
As a teacher, we typically have staff meetings once per week and professional development days 4-5 times per year. Sometimes these meetings are extremely valuable and I feel like I learn a lot of great information that I can immediately use in my classroom. But other times? Well, we’ve all been in unproductive meetings. Despite the tight budget in schools, a full day of professional development can often cost around $12,000!
What can we do?
Right now you may be shocked at the cost of a meeting. I know that I was the first time I calculated the cost of a staff meeting. However, although most people don’t like meetings, we often think of them as a necessary evil.
But I think that we should always challenge conventional wisdom. Do we really have to have a weekly meeting with other members of our department? Is a daily status update meeting necessary to be productive? Is an “all-hands” meeting ever really necessary for your company?
As a manager
If you are someone who generally decides when a meeting should happen and ends up running the meeting, then you are in a prime position to make sure that every single meeting is effective and efficient. In order to do this, there are 4 things that you should focus on:
- Who should be there: We’ve all sat in meetings that don’t pertain to us or our department. So before you set a meeting and invite everyone around you, make sure that you determine who would actually benefit from this meeting. Then only invite those select people.
- How long should the meeting last: Sometimes we set aside arbitrary blocks of time for meetings. 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, etc. Even though our meeting “should” last 1 hour, cutting even 10 minutes from the meeting time can save a lot of money ($110 in our case study above). So make the meeting short and try to get done early!
- Sticking to the topic: It’s important for everyone to have a voice and be heard. However, it’s even more important to actually focus on topics that are relevant for everyone at the meeting and to avoid topics that are only relevant to a couple of people.
- The objective of this meeting: No matter what’s actually on the agenda for a meeting, it should really be about one of two things: Making money or doing your job better. If a meeting doesn’t focus on one of these two topics, then it probably doesn’t need to happen.
As an employee
As an employee, you have significantly less power over meetings that you attend. However, you can still help minimize the cost of a meeting by avoiding asking questions that only pertain to you and being prepared for questions that may come up at the meeting.
If you have a real good relationship with your manager, you may even make suggestions about limiting the number of meeting attendees or getting rid of the meeting altogether. I suppose that you could also show your manager how much a meeting costs, but I can’t really recommend this with any authority because I have never done it myself!
How to calculate the cost of your meeting
By this point, you probably want to calculate the cost of a typical meeting that you attend. Keep in mind that the only variables needed to calculate this are the meeting length, number of attendees, and average attendee salary (including benefits).
Here’s the calculation: Number of Attendees * Average Salary * Meeting Length / 1,811 Hours Worked Per Year
Just like that, you have the cost of your meeting!
Do you have any ridiculous meetings that you are forced to attend? Let us know about them in the comments!
And thanks for reading!
~Nathan
Let’s keep living a great life … with the help of money. So what’s next?
- You can travel for free by using rewards credit cards.
- You can get motivated and get out of debt.
- You can check out the next post or the previous post and continue to learn.
But no matter what you decide to do, let’s leave the ordinary behind and take action today!
