The True Cost of the “Dilbert Meeting”

When we realize how much meetings actually cost, it should completely change how we think about them

The Meeting from Hades

Let me tell you about one of the worst meetings I’ve ever been in. 

About 7 years ago I was asked to attend a leadership meeting for a local community group. There were about 15 of us in the room. The person running the meeting was infamous for disdaining “corporate practices” like having a focused agenda (I had once foolishly suggested to him that we should decide in advance what the outcome of our meetings should be and was curtly told in response to “stop thinking like a business executive”). 

This meeting broke every “best practice” rule I’d ever heard of. There was no agenda. The meeting leader rambled on from one subject to the next almost without taking a breath. Everyone was throwing in their 2 cents (largely because they wanted to look like they were engaged vs. actually having anything useful to contribute). 25 minutes in, the person next to me leaned over and whispered under their breath “what are we even meeting about?” I told them “I have no clue, but this is only supposed to be 30 minutes long, so let’s chat in 5 minutes about how to get things back on track”. Famous last words…

2.5 HOURS LATER…. We all walked out the room with a collective sense that we had accomplished absolutely nothing. Not a single action item was assigned. No one had bothered to take notes (I assume they had fallen asleep an hour into the verbal meandering). My head hurt thinking about how directionless it had all been.

It was as if I had been living in a Dilbert cartoon.

Credit: “Dilbert” by Scott Adams (2015)

Our Inability to Escape Something We Hate

We’ve generally made meetings a running gag (at best) and a “hiss and a byword” (at worst). Google the term “work meeting memes” and you’ll be overwhelmed by thousands of different jokes mocking the staple of our corporate lives. The average employee spends anywhere between 15-33% of their time in meetings each week! 

So if meetings are generally despised, why do we even bother with them? Why not just move away from the cultural artifact entirely? Some companies have been trying. For example, Shopify announced that all previously scheduled recurring work meetings with three or more people would be removed from their calendars, and a two-week "cooling off" period would be enforced before any meetings could be scheduled; Dropbox kicked off a process known as “Armeetingeddon” in an effort to kill all standing meetings. Others have tried similar meeting eradication techniques.

However, most folks at companies trying to embrace a “kill all meetings” approach have stated that despite a lot of publicity and leadership rhetoric, work meetings never went away. They may have disappeared for a short while, but like weeds taking over a garden, meetings started re-populating employee calendars bit by bit.

Turns out it’s incredibly hard to eradicate meetings.

Why is that? Why is it that we’re so unable to eliminate almost universally derided? 

It’s because deep in their core, meetings have the ability to provide some fundamental value we need:

Value Meetings Give Us:

1. If done right, they can quickly align a group of people with widely different views to a single decision/direction

2. If done right, they can make complicated information easier to understand so everyone is on the same page

3. If done right, they can serve as “idea factories” where creative solutions can be identified

These are 3 jobs that have proven incredibly difficult to accomplish via other methods. Have you ever tried to get a group of folks to align to a course of action via email or Slack? The results are mixed at best. Asynchronous brainstorming is almost always a disaster. 

It’s for these reasons that although we often yearn to get away from meetings, we always come crawling back to them. They simply are the best tool currently available for getting these 3 jobs done, and until alternatives consistently prove otherwise, we’re stuck with them.

One thing that is helpful to remember is that meetings are simply tools by which to accomplish decision making, brainstorming, and communication of information. Like any tool they can be effective and powerful in the right hands, or woefully inadequate (and even harmful) if used by someone who is untrained, careless, or lazy.

Likewise meetings can be overused. You want to avoid the “if you have a hammer, every problem becomes a nail” situation. Meetings can be powerful, but should be used sparingly. Like any tool, there are certain situations where they’re great (ex: making a decision with a small group), but other situations where another “tool” (ex: an email or Slack message) would actually do a better job. We shouldn’t automatically default to using meetings as our one and only tool.

The True Cost of Meetings

We don’t usually think of meetings as tools. Even fewer of us think of them as “investments”.

Once I was tasked with running my company’s Quarterly Business Review (QBR), a large meeting where all of the top leadership (directors, VPs, and C-Team) meet to discuss the core challenges facing our company. There are ~50 people total there.

As I ran our CEO through the plan for our plan for the 2 day QBR he said something that caught my attention: “I fully understand the cost of getting this group together, so I want to extremely certain that we’re using this time to move the business forward rather than just “look busy” and waste a bunch of time & money.”

I took a moment to think about what the “cost” of this meeting was. But when I did the math, it was pretty staggering. We were spending close to $75K for that one single leadership session. All of a sudden, I felt an immense weight settle on my shoulders to make sure that this meeting was not only efficient, but extremely productive and high-value.

Here’s how I arrived at the $75K number (and I’d encourage you to run this quick math on any meetings you’re currently planning or attending):

Meeting Cost ($) = (Hours in Meeting) X (# of Attendees) X (Hourly $ per Attendee) 

Want to just do a quick 30 mins sync with 2 VP’s? Better be sure you’re willing to spend the money:

• (0.5 hour meeting) X (3 attendees) X ($100 hr/per attendee) = $150 bucks!

How about an hour meeting with 10 people? Here’s the cost on that:

• (1 hour meeting) X (10 attendees) X ($75 hr/per attendee) = $750 bucks!

When you think about how much the average meeting costs it completely changes your paradigm on how valuable that time is. I think it would totally change business if folks started considering how much each meeting would cost before they just threw a calendar invite out there.

Imagine if the first slide in every business meeting looked something like this:

I’ve been shocked at how often folks just show up to a meeting without any sort of a game plan. People just wander into a conference room, spend the first 15 minutes making small talk, and then often spend time zoning out or checking email instead of being focused on the topic at hand. Every single one of those minutes cost $$$! If you spent $$$ that way in any other part of the business you’d be fired for criminal negligence. 

I now think of every meeting as a “cost” vs. “benefit”. I’m also firmly in the camp that meetings are tools that can provide enormous value, but only if we start using them in the right way.

(Side note: If you are someone who is known for running meetings that “don’t stink” you’ll be amazed at how much it will differentiate you at work; folks who know how to use the “meeting tool” well are in short supply, and there is a huge demand for leaders who know how to extract real value out these tools).

With all of this in mind, for next week’s article we’ll be sending out our “guidebook” on running meetings that don’t look like a Dilbert cartoon. We’ll cover what to do before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting.

Buckle up.