The Price Tag on Your Standing Meeting
Every recurring meeting has a price tag - most of it invisible. The figure on your screen is what that block on the calendar costs in loaded salary time each occurrence. It is not an argument for cancelling the meeting. It is a way of deciding what a meeting at that price ought to produce.
Multiply It by the Year
One occurrence rarely changes anyone's mind. Take the number and multiply it by how many times the meeting happens in a year, and the conversation changes. That annual figure is a real line of spending, approved by nobody and reviewed by no one. Do the same for every standing meeting on your leadership team's calendar. The total is what you are spending on internal coordination before any work gets done.
Cost Is Not the Problem - Output Is
An expensive meeting that produces decisions and clear owners is good spending. A cheap meeting that produces a status recap everyone could have read is waste at any price. So put the cost next to the output. List what came out of the last three occurrences: decisions made, owners named, problems solved. If the list is short relative to the number on your screen, the issue is not the length of the meeting. It is the agenda.
Change the Agenda Before You Cancel It
Cancelling a costly meeting usually relocates the cost into hallway conversations and one-off interruptions, which are harder to see and no cheaper. Try the smaller changes first. Cut the attendee list to people who own something on the agenda. Move status reporting to writing before the meeting so the time goes to decisions. Put the hardest issue first rather than last. Then run this calculator again against the shorter version and compare it to what the meeting now produces. If the cost dropped and the output held, you found the waste.
Common questions
How do you calculate what a meeting costs your company?
Take each attendee's fully loaded hourly cost - salary plus benefits and employer taxes, not just base pay - multiply by the length of the meeting, and add up the attendees. Then multiply by how often the meeting recurs in a year to get the real figure. The version most owners underestimate is the recurring one, because a modest per-occurrence number becomes a substantial annual commitment once it repeats every week for a year.
Are recurring leadership meetings worth the cost?
They are, when they produce decisions that would otherwise take weeks to surface. A leadership team without a reliable rhythm does not save the time - it spends it on repeated one-off conversations, duplicated work and problems found late. The right question is not whether to meet but whether the agenda justifies the attendee list. Judge the meeting by decisions made and owners named per occurrence, and compare that against what it costs to hold.
How can you make a leadership meeting shorter without losing value?
Move information out and keep decisions in. Circulate numbers and status in writing beforehand so no meeting time goes to reporting. Invite only people who own an item on the agenda. Sequence the hardest issue first, while attention is highest. End every item with a named owner and a date, said out loud. Those four changes usually shorten a standing meeting on their own, because reporting was consuming the time that decisions needed.
