The Hidden Cost of Meetings
Here’s a potentially unpopular opinion: I think meetings (especially face-to-face) should be valued more and held in a higher regard. As agency leaders, we find ourselves in a daily meeting whirlwind. We attend stand-up meetings, Zoom meetings, weekly team meetings, planning meetings, project retrospectives, sales meetings, cross-functional meetings, offsite meetings, etc. We allocate more time during the day to discuss the work as opposed to doing it. Your clients are promised creative work—projects that need blocks of uninterrupted time to reach completion. But when your day is filled with interruptions from an avalanche of meetings, you must still figure out how to get your work done. Ultimately, you secure this uninterrupted time after business hours, when the Slack notifications and office walk-ins slow down. This is frustrating, as it takes away time you want to spend with family and friends. It’s also costly.
That got me thinking—what are the hidden costs of meetings?
Opportunity Costs
How much does it cost to attend a one-hour internal meeting?
Take a moment to formulate your answer. Now, let’s say that meeting is taking place the same time as a virtual conference, where you will be a featured speaker. Did your original answer change?
Attending the internal meeting clearly has a cost when something of value is competing for your time. The opportunity cost (attending the internal meeting) is the value of the lost opportunity (to speak in front of potential clients). I’m not making the case for us to constantly second guess our actions—that’s essentially FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). However, I do want us to understand that there is a cost to saying "yes" to every meeting request. That “yes” is also a "no" to other activities, like developing thought leadership, meeting new prospects, upselling current clients, etc.
Financial Cost of Meetings
How much does it cost to attend a one-hour meeting with five people?
A one-hour meeting with five people is technically a five-hour meeting. To determine the financial costs of that five-hour meeting, we need to divide each employee’s salary by 1,880 (the average number of working hours in a year - see this article for more info on employee utilization). Combine each employee's hourly wage, and then multiply it by the (5) hours spent in the meeting. See example below.
For the sake of simplicity, let's say everyone in the meeting is making around $75,000.
$75,000 / 1,880 = About $40/hour
$40/hour * 5 hours = $200
Now, let's look at the cost of this meeting on an annual basis.
Annual cost is $200 (weekly cost) * 47 (average # of working weeks) = $9,400
The annual cost to hold this meeting is just under $10,000 per year. But in reality, we're in meetings a lot more than one hour per week. Think of how much we're spending to sit in meetings and discuss the work that we should be doing instead of doing the work. The cost is staggering.
Key Takeaway
If we can think of ways to reduce meetings times, then we can increase employee utilization and invest that time on revenue generating work. You cannot (nor do you want to) completely eliminate meetings, as they are instrumental to planning the work that must get done. So, what can you do instead? You can be deliberate about when to say "yes" to a meeting request, and when you should say "no." Meetings are an investment in time—and time is one of the scarcest resources you have at your agency.