Perils of the meeting cost calculator

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted

-  William Bruce Cameron

Have you been part of a bad meeting? The one that started late and went on too long, or the one with a lot of unnecessary attendees and where too many people felt the need to drone on and on, or any one that involved shouting. Bad meetings can be one of the most frustrating parts of organizational life.

Have you been part of a good meeting? The one that started on time and had a clear purpose, or the one with meaningful dialogue built on trusting relationships and solid facilitation, or the one where people left with relevant information or a well-thought-out decision. Good meetings can be one of the most rewarding parts of organizational life.

In my experience, the public service has more bad meetings than good ones. So it's not surprising that some public servants have fallen in love with the idea of calculating how much bad meetings cost. A couple of years ago, on his own time, an enterprising public servant named Sean Boots made a calculator. Add in the classification of each meeting attendee and how long the meeting is and voilà! you can see the salary cost that meeting represents. For extra fun, you can even have it run during a meeting and watch in real time as the seconds - and the dollars - tick by.

It's kind of a cool toy, and can be pretty eye opening. But we should be cautious about how far we take our enthusiasm. It's simply too easy to take this single data point - salary cost - and use that as the entire metric for how to evaluate a meeting.

Good meetings serve one or more of several valuable purposes:

• allow for dialogue and exchanges of ideas
• result in better decisions than those made by a single person
• reduce misunderstandings due to communication cues from body language and tone of voice
• build relationships that help business get done
• make good use of time because they are a many-to-many form of communication

If we over-emphasize the dollar cost of meetings, we may be tempted to forgo them and miss out on the benefits they can provide. No one has built a calculator to show the opportunity cost of the dialogue we didn't have or the relationship we didn't build. If we examine the cost of having a meeting without considering the cost of not having it, we are only looking at part of equation.

It's analogous to people who decry government waste over my $12 cab ride to the airport without considering the $150.00 in salary & supplies for our administratively-heavy process for me to submit a claim for it. Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees.

If we can agree the enemy is bad meetings, then let's campaign for better meetings instead of eliminating them altogether.

PS - If you haven't seen it already, the meeting cost calculator is a neat toy. Just promise me you won't put in the header of every meeting agenda.