alt Hacker NewsI want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting.
I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.
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A friend of mine built something for this: https://howmuch.poiesic.com/
Microsoft do have a tool for that at the business level but of course it costs (Viva Insights).
Alternatively you can build your own with MS Graph Data Connect but also it costs.
I've worked a place that tried it. It does nothing. It's a random number that nobody cares about. Everyone quickly concludes that running a company is expensive and gets used to that. It's not their money, after all. They don't get to spend the saved money on a fancy lunch or something. It's just more money going into the pockets of owners/investors.
People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that requires conversation, and they're often late because they're coming from other meetings that ran late because they were having difficulty coming to a decision. Awareness of cost doesn't affect these at all. The decisions still need to happen.
Okay, but only if this is balanced by accounting for the cost of IC engineers’ solo time too. Sometimes it does feel like meetings waste a lot of time/money quickly, but I’ve also watched people burn money by not having meetings and going the wrong direction for weeks, watched teams over-engineer the crap out of features nobody asked for, watched people tear out huge swaths of working code they just didn’t like and waste years re-implementing it, only to have it be buggier for a few years and then end up with basic design flaws, sometimes the same ones as before, and sometimes new ones…
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!