In a recent MyMidwest (Midwest Airlines) inflight magazine there is a story by Kimberly Douglas of FireFly Facilitation on Meeting Management. If we look at a couple of the numbers from Douglas’ research we can begin to quantify the impact of meetings.
38,000 msft employees say that their 5.6 hours per week spent in meetings are unproductive. That’s over 11 million hours of meetings. Now if we say the average msft employee makes 100k per year (including benefits), that translates to ~ $50/hr. If we do the math, that’s ~ $550 million a year in meeting costs.
Microsoft’s 2009 annual income was $58.4 billion which makes just their meeting costs roughly 1% of their annual income. Let’s make a couple more assumptions: that half of that value is waste (more people than needed, run longer than necessary, etc) and we could reduce that by 10% which should be easy. The result is ~ $22.5 million. I am guessing here, but it should be worthwhile to at least try and improve upon meeting management and find some other way to leverage that $22 million.
- What % of time do you spend in meetings?
- Would your employees feel that meeting management and effectiveness could be improved upon?
- What would you do with an additional 1% of your annual income?
- In what ways could you improve meeting management?
PureStone Partners LLC 
Very timely. I received a staffing plan from a client last week. Included in the plan was 10% time for meetings for staff and 25% for managers. The real kicker was that they had a line item called “Wasted Time” that totaled 25%. Combine that with the fact that they didn’t complete half the work they were assigned to do in the beginning of the year, and you have a compelling case that the department is ripe for a management overhaul.