Are meetings worth it?

…a recent survey found that an average employee spends 5.6 hours in meetings each week.  Throw in prep time and wrapup time and that number probably extends to almost 8 hours a week.  And frankly, in my experience, that number is low.  But for the sake of argument let’s use 8 hours as a baseline.  Let’s postulate that an average worker costs a business in salary and overhead approximately $100,000 per year fully loaded.  This means the average person spends approximately 400 hours (50 weeks * 8 hours per week) in meetings.  That cost is approximately $22,500 for the fully loaded worker.  Note that in an average work year (say 2000 hours) almost one fifth is in meetings.  In a medium sized firm of 100 people, over 400,000 hours of time is spent in meetings based on this math.

400,000 hours – that’s ridiculous!

You can read the full article “Costly Meetings” here.