Guide
How to tell if a meeting was worth it — and what to do instead
A practical guide to meeting costs, the conditions that make synchronous time genuinely necessary, and what to replace bad meetings with.
Every meeting has a salary cost
A one-hour meeting with 8 people is 8 hours of salary time. At an average fully-loaded cost of £35 per person per hour, that is £280. Most organisations spend this without calculating it. The Meeting Worth It Calculator makes it visible because visibility is the first step to reducing waste.
Synchronous time earns its cost when it produces decisions
The legitimate use of a meeting is to produce a decision or action that could not be reached asynchronously — because it requires negotiation, nuance, emotional attunement, or a fast back-and-forth that email cannot replicate. Status updates, information-sharing, and agenda items with a single right answer are candidates for replacement.
Most meetings that could be emails need a decision owner, not a meeting
The reason recurring status meetings persist is often that no one is empowered to make a decision without a room. The fix is not fewer meetings — it is clearer ownership. When someone is empowered to decide, the meeting often dissolves naturally. A well-structured Slack thread, shared document, or email chain with a decision deadline can replace half the meeting calendar.