The True Cost of Meetings: How to Calculate and Reduce It

Meetings feel free to schedule because the cost lands on other people's calendars. Making that cost explicit — in currency, not vibes — is the single most effective intervention for meeting load, because it converts 'can I get everyone for an hour?' into 'is this worth $900?'

The arithmetic

• Per-meeting cost: attendees × duration × loaded hourly rate. Loaded rate (salary plus benefits and overhead) is roughly salary × 1.3 ÷ 2080 hours. A 10-person hour at $120k average salary: 10 × 1 × $75 ≈ $750.
• Recurring multiplier: that weekly hour costs $750 × 48 ≈ $36,000 per year — a meaningful fraction of a full-time salary, paid for one recurring calendar entry.
• The attention tax: a mid-afternoon meeting fragments two work blocks, not one hour. Research on context-switching suggests adding 15-25 minutes of lost focus per attendee per meeting for honest accounting.
• Organization-wide: a 200-person company averaging 12 meeting-hours per person per week is spending 30-40% of payroll on synchronous time. Whether that is a good spend depends entirely on meeting quality.

Using the number, not just knowing it

• Put the cost in the invite: some teams auto-append estimated cost to meeting invites. Organizers routinely cut the list or the duration when the number is staring at them.
• Audit the recurring meetings quarterly: rank them by annual cost, then ask each one's owner what it produced last quarter. The bottom third rarely survives an honest answer.
• Price the alternatives: a decision made in a $750 meeting versus a written proposal read by ten people in six minutes each ($75). Some decisions are worth the premium; most status updates are not.

Cutting cost without cutting coordination

The cheapest meeting attendee is the one who reads the recap instead. When every meeting reliably produces a structured summary — as MeetOye's Oya does automatically, emailed to all invitees at meeting end — the 'optional attendee' becomes real: FYI-tier participants can skip, knowing they will get the decisions in two minutes of reading. Cutting three passive attendees from that weekly hour saves about $10,000 a year, and the recap costs nothing.