Every team has a meeting problem. But few teams think about it the right way.
The problem isn't the meetings themselves. It's that nobody thinks about meetings as a finite resource. A budget.
The Meeting Budget Concept
Just like a financial budget, think of your team's time as a meeting budget. The company pays for everyone's time in meetings. That time has a cost.
A 10-person team in a 1-hour meeting costs 10 hours of company time. Every week. That's 520 hours per year. A month of a senior engineer's time, just in standups.
When you think about it this way, "how do we have fewer meetings?" stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a financial priority.
How to Calculate Your Team's Meeting Budget
Step 1: Count total meeting hours per week
Add up all recurring meetings. Include standups, planning sessions, reviews, syncs, and any other regular meeting.
Step 2: Calculate cost
Multiply total hours by hourly rate of attendees. A rough average: take each person's annual salary, divide by 2000, multiply by meeting hours.
Step 3: Set a target
Most teams are spending 20-30% of their time in meetings. A good target is 10-15%. Some high-coordination teams may need more.
Step 4: Audit and cut
Every meeting that doesn't produce value equal to its cost should be cancelled or shortened.
The Meeting Budget Review
Once a quarter, run a meeting budget review:
- List all recurring meetings
- For each, ask: would we schedule this today if it didn't already exist?
- If no, cancel it
- If yes, can it be shorter?
This isn't about cutting all meetings. It's about making sure every meeting is worth its cost.
The Real Benefit
When teams start thinking about meetings as a budget, something interesting happens: they become more selective about which meetings are worth having.
The meetings that survive are the ones that actually need to happen. And because there are fewer of them, people are more engaged when they do happen.
Quality over quantity. Even for meetings.
Your team's time is finite. Treat it that way.
Top comments (0)