Salary time, per meeting and per year — arithmetic shown
A meeting costs the salary of everybody sitting in it. This works out how much, for one meeting and for a recurring one over a year, using salary plus 25% overhead over 2,080 working hours. Every assumption is on this page, and so is what the figure leaves out.
At the salaries shown, with the same arithmetic.
| Meeting | Each | A year |
|---|---|---|
| Daily standup, 6 people, 15 minutes | $86 | $20,553 |
| Weekly team meeting, 8 people, 1 hour | $457 | $23,750 |
| Fortnightly sprint planning, 7 people, 90 minutes | $663 | $17,227 |
| Monthly all-hands, 40 people, 45 minutes | $1,623 | $19,471 |
| Weekly one-to-one, 2 people, 30 minutes | $66 | $3,438 |
| Quarterly business review, 12 people, 2 hours | $1,731 | $6,923 |
An hour of somebody's attention costs their salary, plus what the employer pays on top of salary, divided by the hours they work in a year. This page uses 25% for the overhead and 2,080 hours for the year. Both are chosen at the conservative end: overhead is usually put at 25 to 40 percent, and nobody actually works 2,080 hours, so the real hourly cost is higher than the one used here.
The switching cost, which is frequently larger than the meeting. An hour-long call dropped into the middle of an afternoon does not cost an hour — it costs the hour, the wind-down before it, and the time it takes to get back into the work afterwards. Three meetings scattered across a day can consume the day.
And it counts every meeting as pure expense, which is wrong in the other direction. A weekly meeting that catches one bad decision a quarter is cheap at almost any price. The number tells you which meetings to look at, not which to cancel.
It is the clearest part of the cost and it is not all of it. Salary plus overhead, divided by the hours in a year, is what an hour of somebody's attention costs the company — that arithmetic is sound. What it misses runs both ways: it ignores the twenty minutes on either side that a meeting takes out of the day, and it ignores that some meetings save far more than they cost.
Because salary is not what an employee costs. Payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software and space are usually put at 25 to 40 percent on top. This calculator uses the bottom of that range, so the figure it gives you is conservative rather than dramatic.
The switching cost, which is often larger than the meeting. An hour-long call in the middle of an afternoon does not take an hour — it takes the hour, plus the wind-down before it and the time to get back into the work afterwards. Three meetings scattered through a day can cost the whole day. It also leaves out the meetings that pay for themselves many times over, which are the ones you should be protecting.
Not on the number alone. Cost tells you what to examine, not what to cut — a $40,000-a-year meeting that prevents one bad decision a quarter is cheap. The useful move is to look at the expensive recurring meetings and ask what each one actually produces. If the answer is a status update, it can be written. If the answer is a decision that needs disagreement in the room, it is worth every hour.
Cut attendance before you cut the meeting: most people in a large recurring meeting are there for context rather than to contribute, and context can be read. That only works if the meeting leaves a record worth reading — decisions, owners, and what is still open — which is the part that usually does not happen because the person who would write it is the person running the call.
Most of what an expensive recurring meeting costs is people attending for context. That only stops when the meeting leaves a record worth reading — which is what AVAY does: the call runs in the browser, it transcribes itself with no bot to invite, and the notes, decisions and owners are written while people talk. Read the articles for what to do with a number like the one above, or what AVAY costs.