Today let’s consider the cost of meetings. By this I mean the financial cost to your organisation, not the personal cost of the torment you endure when you attend a meeting.
Having you turn up at work costs your organisation money. There’s your salary to start with. And your national insurance, pension contributions etc. And then there’s a whole bunch of other costs, too. Your office costs money and it’s not unreasonable for your finance people to attach your share to the cost of ‘you’.
There are many ways of calculating the cost of ‘you’, but a good rule of thumb is to take your gross salary and double it. So if you earn £26,000 per year, the cost to the organisation of having you is about £52,000.
This works out to be £1,000 per week or £200 per day.
So a question that’s worth asking as you leave for home is “Was what I did today worth £200 of our organisation’s money?” We won’t go in to how to define ‘worth’ here; it would take too long. But you can see the point of the question.
Now, back to meetings.
Suppose you’re in a meeting that takes half a day, and there are a total of 10 of you there. The cost of that meeting is half a day’s time per person, or £100 times 10. That’s £1000.
Did the meeting generate £1000 worth of value to the organisation?
I leave you with that question.
Next in ‘Meetings 101’ we’ll look at some of the benefits of having a meeting.
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