A few years ago, Shopify rolled out a tool that calculated the cost of every meeting based on the length and specific attendees. Include three employees in a 30-minute meeting? The average cost could range anywhere from $700 to $1,600. Throw an executive in the meeting, and the cost shoots up to at least $2,000.
Rarely do our scheduled meetings come with the same level of financial transparency, but that doesn’t change the fact that meetings are eating your margins.
Let’s talk about the true cost of meetings and how you can restructure your meetings to provide more value to participants and your organization.
Every meeting is a budget line item
Most organizations scrutinize spending very carefully. There are positions and even entire departments for that very task, reviewing software subscriptions, vendor contracts, and new hire salary packages.
But meetings, which also carry a very real cost, don’t usually get the same treatment.
Researchers estimate that companies could save at least $25,000 per employee by reducing unnecessary meeting attendance. Multiply that across a mid-sized business of 100 people, and that’s $2.5 million on the line.
The first problem is that meeting costs are invisible. Attendees aren’t sending an invoice for their time afterward, because the costs just get absorbed internally.
The second problem is that the cost of a meeting isn’t bound to the meeting itself. Participants spend time preparing, reviewing materials, and following up afterward. More importantly, meetings fragment the workday. If you have a start time of 8:30 and a team meeting at 9, you’re not going to get much done in that 30-minute window.
The cost of lost execution time
Once a meeting is over, it’s nearly impossible to jump directly into deep work. Researchers have named this phenomenon “meeting hangovers”, the lingering negative effects that follow frustrating or unproductive meetings. More than a quarter (28%) of workplace meetings leave participants struggling with impaired engagement and productivity. Some people can recover within a few hours, but others have trouble for the rest of the day.
The hidden cost of meetings is especially significant for knowledge workers. Writing, coding, designing, and strategic planning require sustained attention that is almost always found in long focus sessions. When the day is fragmented by meetings, the actual work gets pushed later into the afternoon, evening, or even the weekend.
It’s why so many people feel busy without feeling productive. The day is spent doing ‘work about work,’ and the actual work ends up getting squeezed into other windows of opportunity.
Three assumptions worth challenging
According to Microsoft, 54% of all meetings are hosted by just 10% of employees in a company. That means that a relatively small number of people have an outsized influence on meeting culture.
If you’re one of the people regularly scheduling meetings, these are the assumptions worth challenging before sending the next calendar invite.
1. We need to sync on this
Of course, sometimes you really do need a meeting. A real-time discussion can be helpful for things like:
- complex decisions
- sensitive conversations
- collaborative problem solving
But a lot of meetings are scheduled by default, not out of necessity.
Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself one thing: What specific task can’t be accomplished asynchronously? If you need to share updates, review information, or get general feedback, you should be able to do that in chat or with a Loom video. That way, you disseminate the same information, but when it’s most convenient for everyone involved.
The goal is to reserve real-time collaboration for moments when it creates meaningful value.
2. Everyone should attend
Meeting invitations can snowball over time. You add a manager for visibility, or include two new team members to boost cross-functional collaboration. On its own, a single invite seems harmless. But you start multiplying that by 5 or 10 new meeting attendees, and each meeting starts to get really expensive.
According to recent research, the fastest-growing type of meetings is large, including 65+ attendees. However, hosting meetings of this size is rarely productive. You end up with more cameras off and a very small percentage of engaged attendees.
The most productive meetings include between five and eight attendees, so it’s time to get choosy. When you’re making that invite list, ask who genuinely needs to be there to contribute to the discussion or decision-making. Employees who need to be informed (rather than participate) can receive notes, recordings, or a summary of key decisions.
3. Weekly means forever
Once-a-week meetings are the default for a lot of teams, but that’s mostly because it’s easy. You know that Tuesday at 10 is your department-wide check-in, and you reserve that time slot indefinitely.
Not every team or decision needs weekly coordination, though. If you’re launching a new product, you might be better off scheduling daily check-ins, and if you’re on a roll with a more mature project, you could look at next steps at the end of each month.
You know the famous quote, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’? That’s one way to look at recurring weekly meetings that hold no value.
Practical ways to reduce meeting spend
Some strategies can have a measurable outcome on the quality of your meetings. For example, one company outlined new meeting culture policies, such as discussing topics asynchronously and encouraging employees to decline meeting invitations. As a result, meeting size shrank, meetings became short, and camera use increased, saving employees an average of 21 minutes a week.
Your goal isn’t just to have fewer meetings; it’s to make sure your meetings are creating value and moving work forward.
Audit recurring meetings quarterly
We schedule recurring meetings with good intentions, hoping to help everyone stay on the same page. But a lot of recurring meetings don’t have a clear expiration date, or they continue to occur at the same frequency even when we could space them further out.
Regularly auditing your recurring meetings helps you catch meetings that no longer serve a clear purpose. With that in mind, you can cancel or restructure your recurring meetings. Ask meeting owners:
- What’s the goal of this meeting?
- Who actually needs to attend?
- Could part of this meeting happen asynchronously?
- What would happen if we cancelled it altogether?
Some companies are taking an even more aggressive approach. In his EOY memo titled “Building a Winning Culture in 2026,” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced that all recurring meetings would be automatically cancelled every six months. To continue meeting, teams would need to examine whether they still needed that time together. Mosseri explained to employees, “I want most of your time focused on building great products, not preparing for meetings.”
Create execution-first days
It’s easy to spend your entire day bouncing between meetings, messages, and emails without making meaningful progress on your most important tasks.
Execution-first days solve that problem by intentionally limiting meetings during designated periods. (Yes, this is just another name for one of our favorite concepts, teamwide focus sessions.)
You can go the route that Canva took and block off an entire meeting-free day, or you can imitate banking giant HSBC and designate one afternoon a week that’s void of online meetings. Some companies have gone up to three meeting-free days, but research suggests the sweet spot is two execution-first days a week. When meetings are reduced by 40%, employees become more empowered and autonomous, and productivity rises by 71%.
If your team is struggling to have enough time to get work done, protecting larger blocks of time is often more effective than adding another status meeting to improve coordination.
Require meeting outcomes
One of the fastest ways to improve meeting quality is to stop treating meetings as discussions and start treating them as decision-making tools. Every meeting should have a clearly defined purpose before it begins.
Software company Atlassian utilizes what they call “Get Sh!t Done Days,” which are “dedicated one- to two-hour blocks designed for this type of high-impact collaborative work.” One Atlassian employee involved in a GSD session said that the meeting was “like magic.” Here’s how they structure the sessions:
- Schedule a 1-2 hour block of time once or twice a week. Don’t take work time; replace meetings that aren’t being used effectively, and only invite a core group of necessary people.
- Prepare to collaborate on high-priority work. Create a list of tasks that would benefit from real-time collaboration, but don’t worry about a fixed agenda.
- Stay on a video call for the entire meeting. Switch between camera/mic on for planning and questions, then camera/mic off for focused work about what you’ve discussed.
- Alternate between group discussion and individual work. You might try 10 minutes of collaboration and then 30 minutes of solo work. Use chat to connect with team members as you run into roadblocks.
- Aim for progress. GSD sessions should help your team make tangible progress on your goals. Everyone should walk away feeling like the meeting was truly productive.
Protect focus time
Some companies aggressively protect meeting schedules but treat focus time as optional. In reality, focus work is when actual value is created.
Encourage employees to block their own time for deep work and give them explicit permission to protect it. That might look like declining meetings, moving non-urgent discussions, or suggesting asynchronous alternatives.
Mosseri’s memo addressed this exact issue, encouraging Instagram employees to “decline meetings if they fall during your focus blocks.” It’s an important precedent, recognizing that uninterrupted executional time is just as important as organizational performance.
What happens when teams reclaim meeting time
Even a small reduction in meeting volume can significantly increase your team’s capacity. Eliminating a handful of unnecessary recurring meetings could hypothetically increase your team’s capacity just as much as adding a new employee.
That’s why meeting reduction efforts should be treated as important as other cost-saving efforts. Start by understanding how much time is being spent in meetings, then identify how/if that time is producing value. Meetings that eat up more value than they create need to be modified or cut.
Every meeting carries a cost. If you wouldn’t approve the cost on paper, why are you approving it in the calendar?
