Meeting cost ticker
The Meeting Ticker is a fun tool to measure how much money is spent attending meetings. You enter the number of attendees, average hourly salary, and meeting start time, and watch the dollars add up in real time. Meeting Ticker (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)
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Would need more zeroes to calculate the cost of a meeting that included a Gates level salary
http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html
Alex Goldman
Of course, you also have to subtract the cost of donuts and coffee. If the food you eat at the meeting takes the place of lunch, then you have to subtract what you would have paid for the lunch instead.
government will clock this in an instant
define meeting
My boss had me create a fancy version of this for our intranet, I use an AJAX staff name lookup box to get the actual attendees, and it looks up their salary in the payroll database, and keeps a running total. Staff can be added and deleted as the clock runs. To keep salary data (relatively) secure, it only works for meetings with 5 or more attendees.
It was fun to make, and only slightly frivolous.
Anon at @4:
You should have run another clock to record how much money was spent getting you to design this!
We need to figure out why these meetings are so expensive.
Let's have a meeting on it.
Schedule it right after the meeting concerning why we aren't getting anything done.
I have often wondered this. In my tiny, non-profit software company we regularly have two-hour meetings. The average salary is probably $70k, so somewhere around $35/hour. Eight participants = $560.
For $560, we could have probably bought a commercial license for software solving whatever problem we were discussing.
... then again, if I were to bring this up, they'd probably ask me to install a similar one on my computer calculating exactly how much they pay me each day to surf BoingBoing.
BoingBoing, are you worth the thousands of dollars my company has spent on you?
Keeping down the expenses of "Terminal Meetingitis".
I've tended to notice that the number of meetings and hours spent usually are in inverse proportion to the health of the business I'm working in. And the more meetings, the less useful solutions that emerge.
Why isn't any work getting done? Let's schedule a meeting.
My bosses are either in meetings, or sending emails to people they probably just had a meeting with, or are shortly going to have a meeting with.
Wasn't email and teleconferencing meant to replace meetings? I guess that went the way of the paperless office - nowhere at all. Damn corporate culture.
I also wrote an app like this once. It pulled the billable rate for each meeting attendee from one of the databases on the intranet. We called it the "burn rate calculator". Amazing how much $$$ could be spend just getting everyone seated and ready to begin a meeting. We never ever showed it to clients. I think they would have had a heart attack seeing that information in such an immediate way.
@11: Teleconferencing is still meeting. You still have to be listening to at least 40% of what is going on to be able to respond if anyone asks you questions. You can get some work done while in a teleconferenced meeting, but you can't really get down and concentrate.
Teleconferencing is not like a melding of minds -- it still takes the exact same amount of time to say what you need to say.
Tried three times. It doesn't work.
@Chas44:
Make sure you don't put any currency symbols in front of the hourly salary figure - I sat there for a minute or two wondering what it wasn't updating.
ummm. the only pointless meetings are those where no decision-making or thinking gets done.
i think the attention needs to be redirected back at ya — what are you doing to facilitate a useful meeting that accomplishes a goal, or illuminates a new perspective?
Yeah. Attitude is everything and chances are the burned-out nay-sayers are the reason your meetings suck.
It is important that less than five person meetings are not measured for at least two reasons #1 Manager to subordinate meetings should be held at least twice a month to insure proper development and direction and #2 if those meetings had a price tag those meetings might not take place and that would be catastrophic for the business.
Communications are very important and the way to measure success is still based on daily and weekly results.
Your HR rep can give you a "loaded cost" of the average employee, whatever "average" might be. This likely comes in at ~$50-$60US. This includes more than just straight salary: any insurance paid by the company, cost of facilities & utilities, etc.
I like SAMSAM's comparison of this meeting cost VS an off-the-shelf solution that might be had for much less. The only problem with that is whose budget pays for it? How much time and effort does it require to write up a justification for the cash outlay? I'm not defending the bureaucratic red tape, just calling attention to it.
One potential way to save meeting time and costs: make it a stand-up meeting. No sitting unless you happen to be in a wheel-chair. Watch how quickly you work through that agenda. Thanks to Bill Daniels for the idea; I use it all the time.
If you are a billable ressource, you should include your bill rate plus your cost as the true cost of holding a meeting... that's the REAL cost to the company that is deprived of your revenue, if you could be billing instead of being in a meeting...
Fun app. There is definately a need. What what it is worth, there is a portable meeting calculator you can leave in the conference room:
http://www.BringTim.com
Regardless of version (web vs. real deal), they can make meetings more effective.