How much do meetings cost your company?

Meetings take up time and can prevent employees from doing the work they were hired to do if the time isn’t well used. This imposes a cost far too many employers overlook.

They say meetings are where work happens. Well that better be true, because otherwise meetings are a very expensive waste of time.

Far too often we are bouncing around conference rooms feeling productive when we actually aren’t. For most of us, that productivity does not include sitting back in a conference room listening to your product manager ask your colleague for the fourth time about action items discussed in a previous meeting. One he did not attend of course. Everyone else is left scratching their heads wondering why they are there in a catch-up meeting while they have nothing to catch up on.

Maybe some of your colleagues will get distracted by their new email or Facebook notifications as the rules of engagement are compromised. In the end, this makes the previous meeting and the current one a giant waste of time and money. And before you ask: no, this precise scenario is not an exaggeration.

We end up having the same meetings over and over again talking about the same stuff with the same people.

Meetings add up across a team

In addition to the stress it puts on meeting attendees, gathering for meetings has a very real cost in dollars.

We ran some numbers thanks to Harvard Business Review. On average there are 6 people a meeting room. Let’s assume the average salary was $100,000.

A 60 minute meeting with 6 people has cost your org $420!

Let’s assume on the lower side you only have 1 of these meetings a day, which is hardly the case in reality. 5 meetings a week or 20 meetings a month means your team of 6 just ran up a bill of $8,400 for the month. That is essentially the same cost of hiring another person.

An hour long meeting means an hour’s worth of wages paid out to everyone sitting in that conference room. I looked at the averages to be within range. So I wonder how many people are actually in your meetings?

Four people?

Ten people?

Twenty people?

And it’s not just the dollars being paid to the employees that a business is losing in every meeting. It’s the dollars that aren’t being earned.

The biggest cost of a meeting is opportunity cost

Every minute spent in a meeting is a minute each employee could be spending doing their actual job. Instead of attending a meeting they could be designing products, pushing code, hiring new candidates, or interacting with clients.

It is a capital mistake to look at a meeting as simply a block of time which has to be filled with as much talk as possible.

Meetings should be where you discuss, decide, and delegate.

The goal of meetings had better be opening up the doors for your team to accomplish critical tasks that cannot possibly occur without a meeting.

Remember: we are not hired to have meetings. We are hired to work and put our creative/technical skills to good effect. Many of us lose sight of that over time as we become accustomed to meetings and the corporate grind.

Meetings all day every day

This is a real problem, one that cuts across industries. According to Business Insider, there are 11 million meetings in the US every day. The only reason so many meetings take place daily is because meetings are vital to company labor productivity and vibrancy. Without meetings, it is often difficult to keep staff on the same page. Without these meetings, work would grind to a halt and teams wouldn’t be able to coordinate.

Even worse: $37 billion are lost in meetings every year from a few simple mistakes in how one conducts a meeting. That figure doesn’t even factor the cost of meetings which should never have happened in the first place or meetings which are later made redundant by poor follow ups or late starts.

We need to extract the most value out of our meetings

Meetings are a double edged sword. Vital to keeping a company collaboration alive, they also carry the risk of being a big waste of time and money. But while that is true today, it probably won’t be true for very long.

At Fireflies, we want to make every meeting actionable, enabling every person to have tangible notes and outcomes to leverage after the sync. This helps eliminate redundant team meetings and keeps the quality benchmark high.

So if you want to chair an effective meeting, it had better be important. More importantly though, that meeting shouldn’t go to waste. Nothing is more wasteful than using the next meeting to go over again things you already noted down in the minutes for the previous meeting. If it is that you actually took meeting notes and sent out follow ups.

Instead of having a redundant meeting, have both meeting agendas and after meeting notes to send over. Proper documentation of all critical info can save a ton of time for all. If you don’t feel like you are able to both pay attention and take notes, then hire Fred Fireflies to do it automatically. Let’s give time back to everyone in that conference room.

Krish is a co-founder of  Fireflies.ai where we are building an AI assistant that joins your meetings and automatically captures meeting notes.

Follow on Twitter: @krish_ramineni

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