Meetings Cost

Meetings are part of our day-by-day activities. All companies do meetings, which probably is the most common practice ever. However little is done to change or even improve such practice. How many times do you see people cleaning up meetings, meaning analytically and systemically removing meetings as a regular activity? During the 2020 pandemic, everything became a meeting resulting in a Zoom call. Do you want to troubleshoot some problem, you need a meeting, do you need to ask your friend how is he going, guess what? You need a meeting.

Here are some numbers based in the US:

• 1M+ meetings per year

• 36-56M meetings per day

• There is a debate is 50-80% is waste or 93% is effective

However, engineering meetings do not get things done. Even if the meeting is “productive” nothing is really done. Being a VP or C-level is one thing, meetings are a must, since your job is to create alignment but for engineers is another completely different reality.

People often complain about meetings and the lack of time to do real and productive work but at the same time:

• No Time Protection: The calendar is wide open with 3-5 meetings overlapping.

• Poor Offline Resources: No wiki, No videos, no FAQ, no recorded presentation.

• No Retrospectives: If you don't talk about the problems, they do not go away. Is it really necessary to have a meeting to talk about problems, always? 

People are used to meetings, it is how people operate. However, people are not effective with meetings. For all the reasons I just mentioned before No Time Protection, Poor Offline Resources, and No Retrospectives. However, there are other factors that contribute meetings to being really bad, such as:

• No Preparation: People get into the meeting without homework, making most of the time to be on “contextualization”, when you realize the meeting is over when you barely scratch the surface. 

• Meeting Multiplication: Meetings tend to be multiple, one meeting easily spans to 2-3 other meetings. Why? Because someone's goal was not achieved and then everybody is hosted now :-) 

• Meetings Before Meetings: Pretty sure you have a workmate or several that book a meeting before a meeting. IF you will do a meeting before the meeting, why do the original meeting? This is a common anti-pattern in the technology industry. 

Shopify Meeting Observability

Meetings have a cost and it is not small. Shopify discovered that the average cost of a meeting is between 700-1.6k USD dollars. Lots of money to not get things done. Shopify helps to fix the meeting issue by putting Observability into meetings and has a price calculator that displays the cost of the meeting before you booked. It’s a very clever solution.

Now there are lots of meeting calculator tools out there like: Meeting King or HBR Meeting Cost. IMHO the only drawback with this approach is that you can easily figure out how much people make. Some people find that good, that salaries should be transparent, but I personally don't think so. 

Hidden Costs of Meetings

An overload of meetings can affect team morale. No one asks if the meetings are productive or if they want to be part of it. Sometimes refusing a meeting is considered an act of bad taste, and a lack of professionalism. But is it really true? Lean thinking, Deming ideas, and lessons teach us that people just want to feel pride at work and get things done.  

Meetings on top of meetings make people tired, stressed, and not healthy. Meetings non-stop back to back means you have zero free time, how are you gonna get things done outside of the meetings?  Unfortunately, the only way to avoid a trap is not to follow into one. 

Are all Meetings Bad?

Most of them yes but there are good ones, for instance:

• 1:1: Meetings to talk about projects, careers, feelings, and objectives are often useful if executed well.

• Retrospectives: IMHO the best and more important kind of meeting that companies do not perform and when performed is way too shallow. 

• Blameless Review: Also known as Postmortem. Meetings to understand why a piece of software fails are very educational and necessary.

• Training, Mentorship, Working Session: When you are getting some training, like a Rust training, mentorship session, design session, code review, or debug session often needs to be a meeting rather than the regular pair programming to the hybrid reality the world has currently. 

How to Make Meetings More Effective?

First of all, consider not doing meetings at all and killing as many meetings as possible. Meetings that can be better handled with offline resources such as:

• Don’t book meetings For Status: You Slack chats, and issue tracking tools such as Trello, JIRA, and others. Have a Slack channel for updates, but avoid daily status meetings. 

• Avoid Many Recurrent Meetings: Recurrent meetings are the worst. Many recurrent meetings are problematic. It is very common to have recurrent 1:1, planning and OKR meetings. Such meetings are fine, but if every problem, task force, or bug you have a new set of recurrent meetings you are in trouble. 

• Text & Recorded Video: Leverage wikis, and record presentations in the form of videos, FAQs, and Slack chats. Write some notes in a wiki, with some diagrams, and use it as a starting point for conversations.   

• Use Async Communication: Slack chat can and should be async, you can mark messages for later and avoid blocking people immediately. IMHO it is still possible to work with Slack in an async way (non-blocking) and at the same time have a decent response time. 

• Protect Engineer's Time: Engineers should not be doing meetings 24/7. IF meetings do not have deep technical conversations and do not have engineers there. Block time for work, don't let people take your time away easily. 

Being in a customer-facing or service team is a bit harder to avoid some meetings, but it is still possible to handle more communications over async chat (slack) than doing everything in a sync-blocking way (traditional meeting).