The Rise of The $1,000 Meeting

"I been working, I'm up in here with some change to throw"

- Iggy Azalea, "Fancy"

How much does your company spend on internal meetings in a given week?

How much do the internal meetings that you personally schedule cost your company?

A recent Harvard Business Review study at one company found the prep time for one weekly executive meeting equated to over 300,000 people hours each year- .

But even if you forget prep time, adding up the hourly salaries of the attendees of ONE large internal meeting could come out to well north of $1,000. How does that math work?

• An employee making $100K in total comp and benefits costs about $45 / hour, assuming a 9 hour workday, 5 days a week.
• If your meeting is at least 60 minutes and you have over 23 people in it, you're already north of $1,000.

The scariest part? The $1,000 estimate severely understates the expenditure, because the real cost is the value-creating opportunity sacrificed during that time. 23 hours of aggregate company time... what could someone have accomplished with a 2.5 days of their time back?

Internal meetings have real and often significant costs to a company or organization.

Contrast the "unlimited resource" mindset around internal meetings vs. meetings with professional services firms (e.g., lawyers, consultants) that charge $100+ per hour for their time. When the meter is explicitly running, you're actively watching the clock from the moment the meeting starts, and you're ensuring that the number of people in nice suits sitting across from you is kept to the minimum required. With the internal discussion, meetings expand to fill the time, and distribution lists get bloated quickly.

Exacerbating the problem is that the personal cost of booking meetings has dropped to almost nothing. Shared Outlook or Google calendar availability has made scheduling fairly frictionless and immediate. Not surprisingly, at most companies, the number of internal meetings has skyrocketed at an alarming and stifling rate.

This is NOT to say that internal meetings are intrinsically bad. We meet to communicate, align, problem-solve, and crank on stuff. If any company's employees (large or small) constantly went running in different directions, it would be a terribly bad scene. We also don't want to work in an environment in which colleagues are unapproachable, and even when you do connect with them, it feels like there's a gameshow ticker counting down the seconds. That would be horrible for collaboration and for culture.

What SHOULD we do to mitigate our current state of meeting overload? Here are four actionable recommendations on things that I have found to be successful:

1. Actively consider the amount of aggregate man-hours being taken up by every meeting you schedule. Awareness is the first step. Do the math on "total company time" and, A) consider whether it will have a positive ROI given the amount of time, number of attendees, and what you want to accomplish; and B) think about ways to get the cost down and still achieve your goals. This is equivalent to the carbon footprint on your airline ticket... it keeps you aware of the costs that are not intrinsically top-of-mind.
2. Starve meetings for time. Have a 60 minute meeting on the books... could we accomplish what we need to in 30 minutes? Is the 30 minute meeting really supposed to be a 10-15 minute touchbase? Book it that way then. Don't go with the Outlook default times, or the meeting will expand to fill them.
3. Be fanatical about upfront agendas, pre-reads and pre-work, and post-meeting action items. Particularly if it's your meeting, it's your responsibility to make it as productive as possible. That means preparing invitees in advance, setting expectations for what you want to achieve, and then driving to an outcome with swift follow-up. Think about the $1,000 meeting, or even the $400 one. Do you really want to just dump that money down the toilet, because you skimped on the extra 15 minutes of effort required to achieve impact?
4. Block time for "nothing" daily, and stick to it. I stole this from Jeff Weiner's post last year. Scheduling "time for nothing" actually puts a block on your calendar that A) allows you to get work done, and B) keeps meetings from automatically jumping into an open spot on your calendar, acting as a forcing mechanism for some extraneous meetings to drop off.

In any company or organization, your colleagues are your most powerful asset, and meetings are your entree to activating them. The key is to ensure that you're leveraging that asset in a way that's productive, respectful, and ultimately impactful. Minimizing the number of unnecessary or ineffectual meetings is the best way to make that happen.

TL;DR: Internal meetings cost a lot in time and resources. Consider the cost and look for ways to make meetings more effective or cut them out altogether if they're unnecessary.

Note: This is a slightly modified version of this post, based on feedback I'd received on the original.