It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and the agency had gotten quiet, all the conversations had been exhausted, and I was as well. There was a generous portion of scotch in the rocks glass next to the over-stuffed leather sofa I was sitting on. If it sounds like I'm sitting in a little speakeasy at an agency client then you are hearing right.
It was also the time of day when some of the more senior leaders in the organization would come by for their happy hour drink, and Raj the CTO of the 60-person agency had joined me a few minutes before, and asked me what I have been working on lately. Meetings were the topic, and he was shocked with what I told him about how much meetings actually cost — not the vague "meetings are bad" complaint, but the math.
Shaking his head and disbelief, he made a resolution which I don't know whether he ever followed up on: he was going to write an app that scraped the company calendar, looked up every attendee's loaded cost, and tallied the bill per manager who'd convened the meeting. A meeting spending leaderboard.
I've implemented a lot of different metrics and scorecard and agencies and virtually every one of them changes behavior… Sometimes in ways you don't expect. But sometimes in a quiet moment, I try to imagine what it would be like, for that mid-level account manager to see their name at the top of the leaderboard… how do you think that would feel?
Math Class with Raj
What's surprising is how few agencies ever run the numbers. So let's.
Take a one-hour meeting with six people: two managers, four team members. At a blended loaded cost of $175/hour, that meeting costs the agency $1,050 just in labor. In my book UNMANAGED, I note that my own return on time invested (ROTI) data and other research says managers rate meetings at about 50% valuable and team members at about 25%. So the value delivered is roughly $175 for the managers and $175 for the team...let's call it $350 of value out of $1,050 spent. That's a $700 loss on a single meeting.
Now add Flow disruption. Each team member loses about fifteen minutes winding down before and fifteen minutes restarting after. That's another two hours across the four of them, another $350 gone. The real cost of that one-hour meeting is closer to $1,400, against $350 of value. A manager who calls five of those a week is burning roughly $5,000 in net meeting waste. That's $250K a year, just from one calendar.
And most of that waste is lost productivity for the people in the meeting.
Most agencies have several managers doing this. This one had probably a dozen or so.
Raj didn't need the app. He just needed a napkin.
The Mechanism Shares Some Blame
Before digital calendars, a meeting required a conversation first. It is called consent. And boy, the good old days were really good: you had to find someone, explain why you needed their time, and get them to agree. I have to admit I didn't appreciate them for what they were.
Today, it doesn't work that way. With Outlook and Google Calendar, you drop an invite on someone's schedule and it's done. The invite imposes itself, and declining requires an apology.
UNMANAGED Excerpt 1 — The Dinner Guest (Ch. 23, pp. 267–268)
Rather than gaining a person's consent first, today we find it easier simply to schedule meetings through their invitations. People's calendars fill up with meetings they never consented to attend. Now you may be thinking, "Hey, Jack, just decline the invitation." The problem is that now we have to explain why we don't want to go to your (stupid) meeting. We essentially have to apologize for saying no.
I like to think of unexpected (or unwanted) meeting invites as an unwanted and surprise dinner guest who arrives knocking at my front door, wondering what we are having for dinner, and presuming that I will welcome them inside out of politeness. Yes, I should defend my evening and my privacy. But like many others, and as an introvert and frankly a nice guy, I feel I don't have that right. So, I say, "Okay . . ."
People face this same dilemma when confronted with meetings that impose themselves on their calendar and, consequently, upon their time and their privacy. And in most cases, it is a manager inviting them to yet another (stupid) meeting, and that is even harder to say no to.
Excerpt 2 — Semler's Three Rules (Ch. 23, pp. 270–272)
[Ricardo] Semler states categorically that companies have too many meetings and that we need to change the fundamental rules behind meetings . . . and he did. His rules are really interesting, though definitely alien to the typical organization:
Rule 1: Anyone can call a meeting.
Rule 2: If you want to call a meeting, everyone has to agree to attend before you book the meeting. If they do not feel it would be valuable to attend, then they can decline.
In other words, a manager who calls a meeting cannot act as some unwanted provocateur, metaphorically knocking on a bunch of people's doors via email and saying, "Hey, we're having a meeting." They instead need to have a conversation with each invitee about whether this meeting is needed.
Now, one of the interesting things that happens when you do this is that if you have to ask everyone, "Do you think this meeting is needed?" then you probably have to explain why you're calling the meeting. In the course of doing that, you may end up having a string of small conversations that are actually far more effective than having that meeting at all, allowing it to evaporate off the calendar before it even appears.
By changing tools and processes, a change to culture occurs—the only meetings that happen are those that everyone can agree might be valuable.
Now this evaporation-through-conversation process may work for some meetings, but there are others that may still need to happen regardless. But even these can be refined. For this, Semler gives us a third rule:
Rule 3: If you're attending a meeting but you feel you are no longer getting any value from it, then you can leave. Bye-bye. Out of here.
This freedom to depart represents a significant shift in the power structure of meetings. In many situations, the invite to a meeting is as much a demonstration of tribal power as it is a functional element of workplace communication. By handing the worker the choice to attend or stay, they take ownership of their time and attendance.
This means it's up to the person calling the meeting to ensure it stays interesting, relevant, and valuable. If not, people can, should, and will leave.
Jack Skeels is the founder of Better Company, where he helps agencies fix the operational patterns that silently kill productivity, profitability, and culture. Over 25 years and 200+ engagements, he's worked with agencies of every size on the problems no one talks about in the pitch. He is the author of Unmanaged. Learn more at bettercompany.co.
