Meetings: The real cost of "people" being there
When's your next meeting? Could you work out the total cost of all the people in the room (or at the end of the link)?
And if it's your company and your profit do you ask yourself – “how much is this meeting/task costing in money”?
Sometimes? Hardly ever? Never?
And if you do “sometimes” or even “always”, are you sure you know the real cost – to compare with the value?
Obviously money is not the only criterion for any decision – but I want to show you one way of working out what (I would suggest) is the “real cost”.
I’ve looked at three typical business/employee scenarios:
- The employee whose job is to provide a service that is charged to customers at an hourly rate. Let’s call her “Sarah”.
- The employee who makes, designs, invents the product or service that is sold to customers. He’s “Bill”.
- The employee whose job is to carry out an administrative function. And he is “Jack”.
Detailed thoughts on these cases and some detailed calculations can be found here.
The conclusion is that it might pay to be super-critical when deciding who attends meetings (like Steve Jobs was - but not so brutally) or allocate tasks.
The question to ask – “is the value to the business and to the individual equal to or more than the real cost of them being there?”.