Not so crazy idea: Charge for meetings

A few years ago at a start-up in London, in response to developers complaining about the amount of meetings they had (sound familiar?), I tried an experiment — I introduced a fee for meetings.

I sent out this message to the company:

Starting tomorrow, meetings with developers will now cost £2 per person per hour (£1 per person for 30 minutes) paid for by the organiser.

The money would go into a pot which was used for our Friday evening social activities.

Things immediately changed

The first thing we noticed was that everyone loved the idea. Not just developers, but others thought it was interesting too. To some, it felt like a game, which helped with its adoption.

Suddenly, the default hour long meetings dropped to 30 minutes instead (half the price, right?)

We noticed a big drop in the number of meetings altogether. A few recurring ‘catch-ups’ were cancelled, in favour of on-demand discussions, only “if there was something specific to talk about.”

When a meeting did happen, only a few people were invited — organisers started thinking about who they really needed (and would ask in advance if they weren’t sure.) With fewer people in a meeting, there are fewer opinions and decisions can be reached sooner.

Meetings still happened of course, but meetings about meetings stopped. The quality of agendas and descriptions in the invites dramatically improved, which allowed everyone to come to the meetings better prepared. The organisers wanted the meetings to be as swift and productive as possible, and they loved it if they could finish early.

My original idea was that the money would come out of the personal pockets of the organisers, but everyone else (mainly the sales team) assumed the money would be paid for by the company (so they expensed it.) It didn’t matter, either way it promoted the idea of there being an additional cost to interrupting developers and dragging them into a meeting room.

Every Friday, we had enough money from the meeting fund to buy everyone a drink.

Why not try it — and let me know by tweeting @matryer how it goes.