The problem with the meeting (hourly rate | billable rate) × members × time cost approach is this: a well-performed meeting is what provides your worth. In this sense, considering a meeting to be a cost based on what you can charge for your time is as ridiculous as a professional sports team considering workouts and training to be costed at the average revenue rate of a game.
The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The question shouldn't be "how much is this costing us in salaries" but "is this meeting productive, and more productive than the alternative activity which could be performed at this time" -- the opportunity cost basis, in other words. Salary/billable is simply the wrong metric.
To the sports metaphor, the question concerning training would be "is this training improving our skills / ability / capability / teamwork", as compared with alternatives (rest/recovery, marketing, travel, game time).
Where meetings often get derailed is that participants:
• Don't understand one another.
• Have different agendas.
• Are simply incompetent.
Identifying these challenges and addressing them, without bogging all participants down in the process is far more productive than simply showing the cumulative pseudo-cost of the meeting.
> The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The cost analysis of the meeting is however helpful to make people realize that there's way too many people in that meeting. It's just like a sports team where half of the players are not actively training while you're paying them all. And on top of that, the effectiveness of a meeting decreases very quickly with the number of participants.
While I do agree with you that the opportunity cost based analysis is better, I do want to point out that for this context (or any context where this might be the case) the opportunity cost of doing an opportunity cost based analysis might be high enough to warrant opting for the inferior but easier/cheaper cost based analysis.
Of course there might be an easier way to quantify the opportunity cost that I can't think of.
"Is the the best possible use of our time, collectively, and/or of each of us, individually, for the organization and our collective goals?"
I suspect you'll find that more effective people tend to recognize when they're in a meeting they 1) don't need to be in and 2) which is keeping them from doing something more important.
Socializing, strengthening group cohesion, and other organizational (as opposed to individualistic) objectives may mean that even if you personally perceive greater benefit at being elsewhere, the organizational / collective goal may still trump, which is why that's included in the metric.
The concern isn't to do a thorough evaluation where that's not itself cost-effective, but to use the correct basis for measurement. Deciding on imperfect information is perfectly acceptable. Deciding on the wrong basis should really be avoided where possible.
The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The question shouldn't be "how much is this costing us in salaries" but "is this meeting productive, and more productive than the alternative activity which could be performed at this time" -- the opportunity cost basis, in other words. Salary/billable is simply the wrong metric.
To the sports metaphor, the question concerning training would be "is this training improving our skills / ability / capability / teamwork", as compared with alternatives (rest/recovery, marketing, travel, game time).
Where meetings often get derailed is that participants:
• Don't understand one another.
• Have different agendas.
• Are simply incompetent.
Identifying these challenges and addressing them, without bogging all participants down in the process is far more productive than simply showing the cumulative pseudo-cost of the meeting.