Our goal is to support happy, healthy and high performing teams. To achieve those qualities, professionals need to be able to actually do the work they were hired for.
Several problems get in the way, one of the biggest is runaway meeting culture. It starves professionals of the time and focus they need to do their best work. To attack this, we’re building the Awesome Meetings Toolkit and the first piece is linked towards the end of this post ⚡️.
When we train people on how to foster better meeting practices, we spend a chunk of the first session helping people understand the ‘profitability’ of a meeting (its value minus its cost).
In order to evaluate the cost side of the equation, we use a specific model based on three assumptions…
Effective context switching (carefully pausing work before the meeting and then picking it up again afterwards) is an unavoidable time-sink that dominates the cost of short meetings.
For worthwhile meetings, the amount of preparation (and follow-up) reading / writing / thinking are proportional to meeting length.
Meeting owners will tend to do more preparation and follow-up than other participants.
Time, Not Money
We believe strongly in expressing meeting costs in hours rather than, say, amounts of money. This is because time is the most precious resource professionals (and, in fact, people in general) have. High performing teams constantly clear the decks of low-value activities and focus ruthlessly on the most important stuff. Whether they’re paid a lot or a little has no bearing on whether they should have this behavior.
Moreover, if we assume there is a correlation between an individual’s compensation and their ability to have valuable impact, then any attempt to ‘monetize’ the meeting profitability calculation would have to account for both the cost and the value of having them in the meeting. Doing this in monetary terms is incredibly complex and most likely futile. For example…
“Anna is a highly-sought-after Product Software Specialist. Her compensation is the equivalent of $250 per hour. If we invite her to a meeting and assume the total time cost to her will be about 2 hours, we’ve cost the company an extra $500. What will the net future dollar value be to the product because she contributed to the meeting?”
It’s inscrutable questions like this that cause us to advise clients simply to guard time jealously and let the money questions take care of themselves.
The Cost Calculation
With those assumptions and caveats in mind, our formula for meeting cost consists of 5 components for each attendee…
Pre-meeting Preparation
For worthwhile meetings, this tends to scale with the duration of the meeting itself. We usually assume 100% for the meeting owner and 20% for everyone else.
90% of what makes a meeting successful happens before the meeting
Context Switch 1 - Pause
The research we’ve seen as well as our own experience shows that it takes about 15 minutes for people to carefully pause what they were doing before the meeting. It then takes about the same time to get fully back up to speed again, afterwards.
For highly predictable, transactional work (like call center ops), it can be quicker. For highly ambiguous, complex work (like software engineering) it can be slower.
The Meeting Itself
We always assume that the time cost to every participant is the full duration of the meeting. Meetings where it's ‘OK’ for people to pay selective attention likely aren’t well conceived.
Context Switch 2 - Resume
The exact same logic applies here as for context switch 1. The aim here is to minimize the total time spent across both context switches - which usually means more time investment during the ‘pause’.
Post-meeting Followup
Just as with the pre-meeting prep, for worthwhile meetings, this also tends to scale with the duration of the meeting itself. We usually assume 50% for the meeting owner and 10% for everyone else.
The Final Calculation
Given these 5 steps, we can now express the total meeting cost in minutes using a single formula.
If M is the meeting time in minutes and P is the number of participants (excluding the owner), we get…
[total time cost in minutes] = 2.5M + 1.3MP + 30P + 30
Concretely, this means a 1-hour meeting with 15 participants (plus the owner) would likely cost 30 person hours. 😲
Next Steps
To make this cost calculation process easier (and to help you adjust some of the assumptions as appropriate to your team/organization), we’ve created a meeting cost calculator 🎉.
As you give it a try, remember our emphasis on ‘profitability’. Just because a meeting is costly doesn’t automatically mean it’s unjustifiable. In fact, to help with this reality, we recommend clients try the following exercise…
Use the calculator to work out the cost of each meeting in your calendar
Sort the meetings from highest-to-lowest cost
Work from top to bottom comparing each meeting (A) to the next one on the list (B) and say to yourself “in theory, A should be more valuable than B, given that it costs more”
Wherever that statement seems false, ask questions about the relative value of A and consider reassessing its duration, cadence and invitees
Understanding that cost is only part of the equation (😛), you may want to dive deeper into addressing your problems with meeting culture. Specifically, you might consider our Fix Your Meetings workshop. It contains three core pieces…
Deliberately selected meetings (prioritization of the right meetings for the right people)
Thoughtful designed meetings (construction of high-ROI agendas)
Skillfully delivered meetings (executing well in your role as a facilitator)
There are lots of things that I took for granted would not or could not be changed about our meetings. This course changed my thinking. I particularly liked the hands-on approach, rather than having it be a lecture. It was lots of fun and very informative.
Thom - Product Director
We’d love to hear about your challenges when it comes to meetings. Maybe we can provide a hot-tip or maybe you’ll inspire us to create more methods and tools…