A one-hour meeting doesn’t cost one hour.
If 10 people attend, it costs 10 hours of work.
With an average labour cost of €50 per hour:
1 meeting = €500
If it happens every week:
€26,000 per year.
And that’s only the direct cost.
The formula is simple
To calculate the basic cost of a meeting:
Participants × duration × hourly cost
But the real problem is the opportunity cost.
During that hour, those ten people aren’t developing projects, serving customers, analysing information, creating or making other decisions.
Harvard Business Review highlighted a Bain & Company case in which a weekly meeting involving mid-level managers represented a cost of $15 million per year for an organisation.
The cost multiplies
A weekly meeting with 10 people costing €500 means:
€500 × 52 = €26,000 per year.
Five similar meetings:
€130,000.
Now imagine that pattern multiplied across hundreds or thousands of employees.
That’s where Meetingitis begins.
Not necessarily because there are too many meetings.
But because too many meetings continue out of inertia, without asking how much they cost or what value they generate.
The question we should be asking
When someone proposes a meeting, we usually ask:
“When should we meet?”
Perhaps we should ask first:
“How much is this going to cost?”
And then:
“What do we expect to achieve in return?”
Because a meeting is an investment of time and resources.
And every investment should be evaluated.
In the next article, we’ll look at the cost that never appears on any invoice:
the impact of meetings on productivity and focus.
👉 Want to know how much your meetings really cost? Start measuring them.
Meetingitis isn’t about having meetings.
It’s about stopping asking why we have them.
#Meetingitis #Meetings #Productivity #ROI #Leadership #Management #FutureOfWork
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