Do meetings crush or improve productivity?
Yes… and yes.
We’ve all suffered through meetings when we lament the time lost. And we’ve walked out of other meetings energized by the exchange of ideas, the decisions we reached, or the connections we made.
The real question is, how do we get the most value out of a meeting at the lowest cost?
Meeting overload is a real issue in many companies. Up to 90% of executive time and up to 50% of individual contributor time, in my experience, is spent in meetings.
Shopify recently released a meeting cost calculator that estimates the cost of a meeting as employees schedule them. It’s simple math: # of attendees X meeting length X average compensation based on job position.
That visibility may be helpful if it leads employees to consider more carefully who should attend the meeting and how long it should last.
But it raises questions about unintended consequences from showing only one side of the economic equation with meetings. When you size “hard” costs but fail to teach and promote the “soft” benefits of meetings, you may over-correct. Many companies missed opportunities to invest in the customer or employee experience when they focused initially on “hard” costs over “soft” benefits.
Companies who want to address meeting overload should focus first on fixing the cultural elements underlying the issue:
Clarifying accountability: when you ask who is accountable , how many people half-raise their hand?
Streamlining decision-making rights: how many people have real or perceived veto rights over a decision?
Ensuring open lines of communication: how many people listen passively during meetings out of fear of missing out?
Then train your employees, including executives, on how to schedule and run effective meetings. Examples include:
Align attendees and time to the purpose of the meeting.
Send out an agenda and pre-read materials ahead of time.
Publish notes, takeaways, and next steps afterwards.
Then you can introduce a cost calculator, though I would make the cost factor time instead of dollars. Reminding a meeting organizer that they are consuming 10 hours of collective time can be more powerful than estimating a more theoretical cost of $5,000.