The Cost of Meetings

The back-of-the-envelope calculation that changed how I think about calendars forever.

My Own Experiment

When I joined as CEO of a 100-person software company with employees in 7 countries, one of the first things I did (first month on the job) was audit every recurring group meeting. I wanted to understand: how much of our collective time was being consumed by calendar invites?

One meeting stood out: our weekly all-hands town hall. When I joined, it was 1.5 hours every week. Nearly 78 hours per year of synchronous time with 75 people on the call — that's 5,850 hours annually. Over two full employee-years, gone.

I reduced it to 1 hour per month instead. The savings: we went from 78 hours per year of meeting time to 12 hours. That's 66 hours recovered every year — and since roughly 75 people attended, we're talking about nearly 5,000 hours of collective time returned annually.

That's the equivalent of creating 2.5 FTEs out of thin air. And we didn't lay anyone off — we just stopped wasting their time in rooms that didn't need to exist.

The Math Behind Meeting Costs

Here's the formula I use: Cost = Average Hourly Rate x Attendees x Duration (hours). It's crude but illuminating.

Let's run some realistic numbers across different meeting types in a typical organization:

* Based on $35/hr blended rate (salary + benefits). Labor Hrs/Wk = Attendees × Duration × Frequency. Assumes 50 weeks/year. Bi-weekly and monthly meetings normalized to weekly equivalents.

For a 100-person company, these five recurring meeting rhythms alone consume nearly $90,000 annually. And that's being conservative — I haven't even included the ad-hoc meetings that spin up because someone's calendar has a gap.

Philadelphia's Meeting Problem

What if we applied this logic to Philadelphia's municipal government? The city employs approximately 25,000 people across more than 20 departments. Let's run some numbers.

Assume every municipal employee spends just 3 hours per month in recurring meetings — department standups, cross-team syncs, status updates, budget reviews, all-hands calls. That sounds conservative, doesn't it? Most organizations like to meet. City government is no exception.

The math:

25,000 employees × 3 hours/month × 12 months = 900,000 hours per year

At a standard 2,000 hours per FTE (roughly 40 hours/week × 50 weeks), that's:

900,000 ÷ 2,000 = 450 FTEs

We could create 450 employees out of thin air. That's roughly 2% of the entire municipal workforce — appearing from nowhere, no recruiting, no hiring, no training. Just by eliminating recurring meetings that don't need to happen.

But wait — let's go deeper. Municipal government has something most companies don't: pension obligations. Philadelphia's pension fund has struggled for decades. Now imagine every one of those 450 phantom employees would have received benefits, retirement contributions, and cumulative pension liability. The financial exposure compounds over decades. The meeting problem is part of a broader pattern of city workforce drift I document in The City Keeps Losing the Workers It Needs.

A More Realistic Estimate

The 450-FTE number above treats every municipal employee the same. That isn't how city government actually works. Most city employees are patrol officers, sanitation workers, fire crews, water-department field staff, prison guards, branch librarians — people whose days are spent outside conference rooms. A smaller group — finance, legal, IT, the mayor's office, planning, the courts, the various oversight shops — actually spend a meaningful fraction of their week in meetings.

Using Philadelphia's 2025 department-level headcount, I split the 25,000-employee workforce into two cohorts by primary work mode:

~19,300 field, operational, and front-desk employees (about 77% of the workforce). Police, fire, sanitation, streets, water, prisons, sheriff, library, parks, fleet, public property, licenses & inspections, behavioral health, homeless services, public health, and human-services caseworkers. These workers spend most of their day outside conference rooms. Assumed meeting load: 3 hours per month.

~5,700 office and professional employees (about 23% of the workforce). The mayor's office, managing director's office, council, finance, revenue, IT, HR, law, planning, controller, property assessment, records, city commissioners, the mayor's office of education, the courts, and the district attorney's office. For these workers, meetings are a primary work activity. Assumed meeting load: 2 hours per workday × 22 work days = 44 hours per month.

The math:

Field cohort: 19,280 × 3 hrs × 12 mo = 694,000 hrs/yr

Office cohort: 5,720 × 44 hrs × 12 mo = 3,020,000 hrs/yr

Total: 3,714,000 hours/yr = 1,857 FTEs

That's more than four times the original 450-FTE estimate. The reason: even though the office cohort is only about a quarter of the workforce, it consumes more than four-fifths of the meeting hours — because for office workers, meetings are the work. Field workers get together for a morning roll-call. Office workers get together for a two-hour budget review, a cross-departmental coordination call, a stakeholder meeting, a status update, a planning session, a debrief.

Now imagine we cut that in half. Half of all those meetings — the ones where the room isn't making a decision, the ones where status updates are being read aloud to people who could have read an email, the ones where two people could have solved the problem in fifteen minutes if you'd just given them a calendar invite titled “15-min sync, no agenda” — eliminate them.

That recovers 929 FTEs of city labor every year. At a blended rate of $35/hour, that's roughly $65 million in annual labor cost — without firing a single person, without hiring a single person. Just by giving people their time back.

To put 929 FTEs in concrete terms: that's roughly the combined staffing of the entire District Attorney's office and the entire Mayor's Office — 939 employees, almost exactly. It's a brand-new mid-sized department, paid for entirely out of recovered meeting time, with no recruiting and no new pension liability on the books.

Not All Meetings Are Created Equal

Here's what I've observed about different meeting types and their ROI:

Standups (daily or weekly) are the most efficient if kept short. 15 minutes max. The key is: does everyone leave knowing what they're working on today? If someone is just reporting status to the room, that's a signal the information should have been async. The best standups are where people talk to each other, not to the room.

Planning meetings are usually worth it if decisions are actually made. But here's the trick: if you go into a planning meeting and come out without decisions, you've just had a discussion. Call it what it is. Many "planning meetings" are really just group therapy sessions where teams commiserate about constraints aloud. Valuable sometimes, but not planning.

All-hands are politically necessary for large organizations but brutal at scale. The law of diminishing returns is brutal: the larger the audience, the less two-way value can happen. I prefer monthly all-hands with a strong async update for the weeks in between. Updates should be readable; all-hands should be reserved for Q&A and recognition.

Interviews are expensive but necessary. The trick is ruthlessly disqualifying candidates early. Too many organizations run full loops on candidates they know won't work. Every hour spent interviewing is an hour not spent building. Respect everyone's time, including the candidate's.

This Is Illustrative, Not Precise

I want to be direct: the above calculations are back-of-the-envelope estimates. Not every municipal employee attends 3 hours of recurring meetings monthly. Some meetings are essential. Some time in meetings is genuinely productive. Alignment matters. Relationships matter. Decisions are harder to make asynchronously.

But that's precisely why it's worth auditing. When I audited our company's meetings, I found that some that looked essential had quietly become cargo cults — ritual gatherings where updates were shared with people who didn't need them, where decisions weren't being made, where alignment wasn't being reached. Just calendars filled out of habit.

Philadelphia's 25,000 municipal employees deliver core services to 1.5 million residents. They fix potholes and respond to 911 calls and inspect buildings and collect taxes. Imagine what 900,000 hours of recovered time could do — redirected to actually serving residents instead of sitting in conference rooms.

The alternative isn't zero meetings. It's intentional meetings. Before you click "send" on that calendar invite, ask: what decision will we make in this room? If you can't answer, don't send it.