How much are your meetings really costing?

How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?

Meeting cost is calculated by multiplying the average hourly salary of attendees by the number of attendees and the meeting duration in hours. For a 1-hour meeting with 8 people each earning $100,000 per year, the cost is approximately 8 × ($100k ÷ 2080 hours) × 1 hour = $385. Multiply by meeting frequency to get the annual cost.

What is a Meeting Overload Score?

The Meeting Overload Score measures what percentage of a team's working time is consumed by meetings. A score under 20% is healthy. Between 20–35% signals moderate overload where deep work is being crowded out. Above 35% is severe — teams in this zone typically report low output, high stress, and fast turnover.

How many meetings is too many?

Research from Microsoft and Harvard Business Review suggests that knowledge workers perform best when meetings are capped at 15–20% of working hours — roughly 6–8 hours per week in a 40-hour workweek. Teams averaging more than 10 hours of meetings per week show significant drops in focused work output.

What is the average cost of meetings for a team?

For a 10-person software team with an average salary of $120,000, meeting 10 hours per week, the annual meeting cost is approximately $300,000. Most organizations underestimate this by 3–5x because they only account for direct salary time and miss opportunity cost, context-switch recovery, and preparation time.

How can I reduce meeting costs?

The four most effective tactics: convert status updates to async tools (Slack, Loom, or a project tracker), enforce a 'no meeting Wednesdays' policy, require written agendas 24 hours in advance, and cap all recurring meetings at 25 minutes. Teams using Zlyqor's built-in meeting tracker cut average meeting time by 40% within 8 weeks.