Yeah, I like the idea of making meetings have some nominal cost - a lot of organizations won’t even blink at letting anyone schedule meetings which cost thousands of dollars per hour but will need three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase. It feels like there could be a middle ground where you basically get reminded of the cost to the organization.
I’ve seen some people who will fill the week up with Groundhog’s Day-style repeat meetings, and even the basic expectation that they have an agenda, goals, and need to summarize what was decided afterwards increases the cost to them personally enough to make better use of everyone’s time.
Given how long it takes to resume productive work after a meeting (for people on the maker's schedule [0]), the productivity value of getting meetings right can be pretty big.
What do you do to reduce the number or cost of meetings? (either as an individual or as an organization)
The main technique I have been using lately is preemptively blocking off chunks of time long enough to get something done (3-4 hours), and declining any meetings that are later scheduled over that time. This groups meetings together, incurring the "resume cost" once per group instead of once per meeting.
I remember a client long time ago struggling to reduce meetings across their corporate departments. We ended up having even more meetings on how to have less meetings.
One benefit of this approach is it requires the organizer do work to justify the cost of the meeting.
Also to embellish your last point, every meeting ends with distribution of a list of decisions made and responsible parties for implementing them. That ensures every meeting generates tangible benefits, and you don’t have the same meeting over and over again.
When I worked at a big corp, we talked about this issue at some point.
We started literally putting up a cost clock, that ticked off the running cost of a meeting. It was surprisingly convincing and motivating for everyone, even (especially?) our external customers who were previously happy to sit and chat for hours.
That said, there's a reason I don't work at a 'big corp' anymore :)
Compare the 1c per minute to the staff cost of meetings and it's not even pocket change. It's like a 1% tax on meetings.
To get a $1k meeting bill with $100k fully loaded avg participant cost or about $50/hr (way too low in metros, but let's be conservative), that's 1600+ meeting hours or about $80k/mo in staff costs.
(I see you do mention this but I wanted to call it out).
I think an interesting way to look at it is, if it can make your meetings one minute shorter than what you do now, you'll actually save.
We want most of our meetings to be effective, but we're intentionally about that one being a bit "sloppy". It's a good time to get to know people and uncover challenges that people might not raise asynchronously otherwise.
Nice, I worked on something similar during COVID but it was more about preparing and tracking needed discussions well enough that you don't have to have the meeting in the first place (company failed, open source code is at https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo). We found that, at least at that time, companies fell into two camps - they were already doing async well and writing things down and didn't need us, or they were just desperately waiting for COVID lockdowns to end so they could get people back into meeting rooms - they don't see it as a problem, had never seen it work any other way, and so we couldn't solve it for them.
If I can share anything or just talk through my experiences let me know. I think reducing time spent in nonsense meetings actually does make the world a better place for the humans in it, at least a little bit.
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