Whaddaya hear, whaddya say? Welcome to episode 27 of the Career Consigliere podcast: your no frills, no BS forum for navigating the corporate job scene. We’re back with you once again for what we hope to be a highly informative and engaging half an hour, or so! One thing we all dread out there in corporatopia: unnecessary meetings! They cost more than just your precious time, and how much this can actually be will ASTONISH you! We’ll talk about what these implications are, and what it all means for you as you navigate the average 8-9 hour day in the office. Gonna be an extra relevant one today podcast land: lettttsss get it!
Whatever you’re doing out in the corporate world, one rule of thumb applies almost universally: there’s a limit to what you can do on your own. Yes, as you get more settled into a job, and especially as you advance in your career, expect to be collaborating with colleagues a WHOLE lot more than you did in the early days. It’ll vary based on the job, but have you ever seen the meeting calendar of somebody director level or above? It usually looks like a Tetris board (those of you 80s and 90s kids listening will get the reference). A mess of colorful blocks of all different shapes and sizes clogging up the screen every which way. And if you really took a microscope to every single one, I’d be willing to bet that easily a third of them could be done without. And lost in the colorful mess of blocks is probably a lot of stuff that MIGHT actually be necessary, but doesn’t REALLY require YOUR presence, or you listening in on the phone, however they’re set up.
Now it’s not to say that ALL meetings are unnecessary. We all know those people who send emails that you need a 1000 sheet roll of toilet paper to capture the whole thing. And in a case like that, yes: a meeting, or at least a 10-minute phone call, is probably the right move. Or if you have a seriously complex topic that involves a lot of interested parties and an email chain would crash your email server, then yes: it’s time to use your vocal cords and talk it out the old-fashioned way. But that’s not what we’re worried about here: we’re focused on the daily stand-ups, the biweekly touch-points where half the people never respond anyway, and the one-on-ones that your manager always seems to cancel at the last minute. Yes, obviously they cost you time where you could have been getting other things done, but it goes further than that.
There’s a pioneer out there that actually came up with a very clever system for the determining the “true” cost of meetings with colleagues. This is a VERY well known company in the online retail space. Unfortunately, mentioning names can sometimes be a no-no in podcast land, so we’ll leave them unnamed to keep everything kosher. But if you do a web search for “meeting cost calculator”, you’ll see immediately who it is. Yes, this company actually came up with a way of estimating how much a meeting actually costs a company. This is all coming from a 2023 article in Yahoo finance: as always, I have the link to the whole shebang in the episode description. It’s a long article, and I only have time to cover the basics, so you’ll definitely want to check out the details on your own.
This corporation uses a number of factors to determine meeting costs: of course there are the obvious ones like the number of people involved and the length of the meeting. But they also factor in who specifically is involved. As one example, they estimate the cost of a 30-minute meeting with three people to range from $700 to $1600. But if you have an executive in this same meeting, it could easily climb north of $2K. Pretty staggering, when you think of how many meetings the average executive is involved in. In my experience dealing with executives, they’re ALWAYS in meetings. And when they’re not, they’re in their office with the door closed and at least on the phone with somebody.
What’s cool is that this company actually programmed this logic right into their calendar functionality. In their system, when you create the meeting invite, it shows you a pane with a bunch of information: the title, the time, the number and names of attendees, all that standard stuff. But at the bottom is a line item for “estimated meeting cost”. Imagine that! Think of how that might stop you dead in your tracks if you’re the one sending out the invite. And it seems like it did just that! Over the course of 2023, this company eliminated 12,000 meetings, for a savings of 322,000 hours. That is a whole crapload of hours! Divide that by 24 hours in a day, and it converts to 13,000 days: Divide THAT by 365, and you get 36 years! Just by adding an estimated meeting cost, the company saved the equivalent of 36 years worth of time in just 12 months!
Now, let’s not get all hot and bothered just yet. It’s all just an estimate. To really calculate this accurately, you’d need to know a few different things right off the bat. Obviously the number of people and the length of the meeting goes without saying: “low hanging fruit”, as corporatopians would call it. But to really nail this down and calculate the “true” meeting cost, you’d need to know the salaries of every person involved in the meeting. Sure, you could use industry medians based on market data, that would get you pretty close. But as we know, salaries swing WILDLY in corporations. A LOT of people are overpaid, and a WHOLE bunch more are underpaid, so we’ll never truly be able to calculate the real cost unless we have exact salary data. Now this is very possible: I’d be flabbergasted if today’s prototypical and highly technical corporation couldn’t build an API or something to feed salary data directly into the meeting cost plug-in and have it perform some calculations based on the person. Let’s open a ticket on it!
But even THAT’S easy compared to the next variable to calculate: the opportunity cost. We talked about this a little bit in an earlier episode about onboarding costs. But just to review, “opportunity cost”, in this case, is basically lost revenue from having your meeting attendees tied up and not producing normal output during the duration of this meeting. Essentially, you need to figure out how much revenue that person typically generates in any given hour to start putting an accurate figure around this. For a job that’s directly revenue-generating (take field sales as the classic example), it’s pretty straightforward. But say your meeting is with all HR people? Or all IT people?? Or all supply chain people??? Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s WAY harder. To get this right, you’d have to come up with some kind of a multiplier for every single job profile in your corporate directory and factor that into the meeting cost formula. Complicated stuff!
But even if you don’t have it EXACT, down to the penny: even if the meeting cost calculator is in the ballpark, it could still be an IMMENSE savings for a corporation, even if for no other reason than the psychological factor. Folks, many of those walking the earth are TERRIBLE with time management. WAY more people show up late than show up early, and even fewer are advance planners. And this bleeds over into the corporate world as well: you’d think that being paid to do a job would keep you accountable, but I’ve seen all kinds of people chronically late in the door, chronically late for meetings, or even just blowing them off altogether, despite however the responded to the invite. So imagine a person like that sending out a meeting invite. Imagine they saw “Potential meeting cost: $5,000”. Don’t you think that might deter them? Do you think it might make them think twice before setting up a meeting that may or may not really accomplish anything? There’s probably not enough data out there yet on stuff like this to make any kind of empirical statement, but from a guy who’s been around, I think tools like these meeting cost calculators can and will be a GAME CHANGER, once they start growing in popularity.
So what’s the takeaway from this? How can this wisdom help us out there in our corporate lives? Let’s answer that with today’s......Consigliere call to action. Guys, I know what you might be thinking. “Ohh, how accurate are tools like this? Would a corporation really take them seriously?? Is it all just a bunch of corporate hocus pocus??? Is it just another fear mongering propaganda technique we’re going to hear about in the news???? Who the hell knows. But challenge the validity all you want: what you CAN’T argue is that tools like this WILL keep the average person more accountable.
I’ve worked for LOTS of different managers, on lots of different teams, and in lots of different functions out in the corporate world. And what always blew me away is how you can give two different people the exact same job, and after even just a few days their workloads and calendars will look completely different. Some people are very intentional and efficient with their time, and some, shall we say, are not. There’s a big misconception out there that the more meetings you have on your calendar, the more important you are, the more your input is valued, the more visible you are, blah blah blah. And maybe there’s some validity to it, but experience is the best teacher, and I’ve seen WAY too many people fill their calendar with useless BS meetings that serve absolutely no purpose. From what I’ve seen, the inefficient person probably needs 4 or 5 meetings to accomplish what their more efficient counterpart can in just 1 or 2. And if we started throwing a financial figure in the face of everyone sending a meeting invite, I think we’d have a revolution OVERNIGHT with how the average person’s time is spent in the corporate world.
The bottom line? Be as intentional as you possibly can with your own time, as well as the time of your colleagues and customers. Although it might be hard to calculate, EVERYBODY’s time has a monetary value associated with it. And even though you might know that intellectually, staring it down every time you click the “new appointment” button will make it very, very real. I’d be willing to bet that if you chopped down the number of meetings you’re part of, you’d notice a TREMENDOUS difference in you and your team’s productivity in almost no time at all. Give it a shot! Even if you don’t have a fancy built-in meeting calculator, you can come up with a makeshift tool of your own: nothing a good old-fashioned spreadsheet can’t handle! It’ll be a really interesting experiment for you and your colleagues.
Sadly folks, that’s all the time we have for today. But have no fears, and shed no tears, because I’ll be back with a new episode very soon. As they say in the industry: no listeners, no show, so do me a favor, and stay loyal! If you find value in my content, please leave me a nice review, tell all your friends, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Beyond the confines of your headphones, speakers, TV screen, or any other crazy contraption with the ability to stream audio, I also provide one-on-one career assistance, so visit my website at career-consigliere.net to learn more about me, book me for a private consult, join my email list, or explore some of the other career services I offer. And to all of you out there in podcast land, remember this: Who’s the boss in your career? You, nobody else.
