The real cost of a meeting (it is not the salaries)
A meeting costs the salaries in the room. But it costs much more in the cognitive context that does not get rebuilt.
The naive math
A one-hour meeting with six engineers, average salary $180k, is roughly $520 in salary cost.
This is the naive math.
The real cost
The real cost is the cognitive context that gets destroyed when each engineer pulls themselves out of the work to attend the meeting. The cost of rebuilding that context — sometimes thirty minutes, sometimes two hours — is the real bill.
Six engineers, one hour of meeting, two hours of context-rebuild each. Twelve hours of lost engineering work.
Multiply by the number of recurring meetings on the calendar. The picture becomes uncomfortable.
What I tell teams
Meetings are a tax on the work, not the work. The job of engineering leadership is to keep the tax rate low. Ask of every recurring meeting: would the engineers attend voluntarily if it was optional?
If the answer is no, the meeting is theatre. Cancel it.
Filed in Engineering Management
Tags: Meetings · Productivity · Engineering