The real, hidden cost of meetings

At some point, almost every company is affected by meeting drain. Employees complain about how much time they spend in meetings, team members can’t find time to meet, no meeting rooms are available, and inevitably, someone starts to joke: How much is this meeting costing us? 

Whether it’s a joke or a serious question, the formula is simple: calculate each attendee’s hourly rate, multiply that rate by the duration of the meeting, then add the cost for each attendee together for a total cost of the meeting.

Using this method, an hour-long meeting with five attendees at the following hourly rates: $50, $50, $70, $70, $150 is $390 out the door. 

That might not sound like much, especially for an important topic that requires a meeting to address. Unfortunately, the actual cost of that meeting for the business is much higher.

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Meeting blast radius

Looking at the cost of meetings based on meeting time alone ignores the larger picture of how disruptive each meeting is to your team’s productivity. Even if the meeting is productive and efficient (which isn’t always the case—bad meetings can be a real problem), not all blocks of time are equal. The cost of meetings goes far beyond the literal time it takes to perform the meeting.

Unaccounted for meeting costs

Switching topics from what you worked on before a meeting, pausing to attend, and getting back to work poses significant productivity costs. After a bad meeting, attendees might experience meeting recovery syndrome (MRS), struggling to return to the zone. Even after a good meeting, getting back in the groove can take effort and time. On top of that, each attendee likely spends time planning and preparing for the meeting, which is left out of most calculations.

How deep work suffers

The impact meetings can have on deep work time is even more expensive than the costs associated with context switching. Have you ever been in a meeting for an hour after lunch, only to return to your desk and decide you no longer have time left for that big presentation you were supposed to put together? Or perhaps you’ve thought there’s no point starting that bug fix until tomorrow? Doing meaningful work often requires long, uninterrupted blocks of time (what we refer to as Focus Time), and meetings are one of the biggest reasons those blocks are so rare.

Without enough hours in the workday for unbroken concentration, teams experience the ambient effect of roadmaps slipping, costing even more than is calculable, and ultimately derailing project estimations and timelines in an endless spiral. 

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Calculating the all-in meeting cost

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How do you quantify the all-in cost of a meeting, including the meeting blast radius of interrupted work time? 

Unfortunately, this is a difficult task that often varies from person to person and meeting to meeting. For each attendee in a given meeting, we’d need to calculate the costs for the time spent in the meeting, their switching costs, and the Focus Time costs.

While assigning a dollar value is difficult, you can measure how many otherwise productive hours the meeting interrupts. In other words, we can calculate how much deep work time we lose to any given meeting.

Tools like Clockwise will do this for you, but you can also run these calculations (or at least obtain an estimate) manually:

1. Define how much uninterrupted work time you need to go deep and get in the zone on a specific task. At Clockwise, we recommend 2+ hour blocks of uninterrupted work (with two hours being the minimum) as this is statistically the most helpful way to feel productive. We’ll use two hours for the rest of the steps.

2. Choose a meeting on your calendar. Now, count the number of consecutive open hours equal to or greater than two hours you could allot to deep work if the meeting didn’t exist.

3. Now, count the number of consecutive open hours equal to or greater than two hours you have left, now that the meeting is on your calendar. 

4. Subtract the hours you have now that the meeting exists from the hours you could have if the meeting weren’t on your calendar. (Subtract your calculation in #3 from your calculation in #2). 

5. Repeat this process for all meeting attendees and add the total Focus Time cost.

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Here’s an example.

Before the 2:00 - 3:00 pm meeting, I had 5.5 hours of Focus Time. After my coworker added the meeting to my calendar, I had 3 hours of Focus Time (and 1.5 hours of fragmented time). 

The Focus Time cost is 3 hours for me alone, not including the cost for each additional attendee in the meeting.

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You can calculate the number of Focus Time hours lost, but translating the Focus Time cost to a precise dollar amount at an aggregate level is more complicated. 

Putting a direct cost on meetings is a nice idea, but it doesn’t solve the actual problem. The problem for most organizations is that they have too many meetings scheduled at the wrong times.

Now what?

Rather than focus on direct meeting costs, the best thing you can do is teach your team members to use their time wisely and treat meetings as a scarce resource. Create a culture where meetings are one of many (but not the only) tools for collaboration and driving progress.

When a meeting needs to happen (and sometimes they do!), remember to keep the meeting blast radius in mind and follow these best practices to minimize impact:

• Schedule meetings back to back as much as possible to reduce the cost of switching between work and meetings (and to reduce fragmented time between meetings)
• Consider the impact your meetings have on Focus Time cost, and use Clockwise to calculate Focus Time dynamically so that you can choose the least disruptive meeting time for all attendees 
• Implement a meeting scheduling tool that suggests meeting times based on workers' preferences and how each meeting will impact their Focus Time
• Use flexible meetings when you can, so Clockwise can continuously create more Focus Time

Show your team that the cost of meetings goes beyond the time spent in the meeting alone, so they can better understand how to use meetings effectively. Get started with Clockwise for free.

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