I strongly agree with your case. There are too many useless, unproductive, expensive meetings out there. Recently we can notice the trend of the ‘anti-meeting’ vibe. We don’t need them, but then again, we do … — ish.

It is risky to just put it in numbers with the salary like you did, it is very easy to call out meetings as being ‘expensive’, I used to do the same. In this case, we are ignoring the surrounding context and potential. We can’t express or account for all these minutes in dollar signs. Some people spend 30min having coffee! That’s a 50$ coffee, and it’s not even from Starbucks!

But in those 30 mins, that engineer was having a chat with a data scientist from the other department. Talking about life, maybe even work! During that knowledge sharing session, they might come up with an innovate idea that will generate additional revenue! Who knows? Could have been the best 50$ invested by the company.

That coffee break can be considered as ‘real work’ as you call it. ‘Real work’ is far more than writing code, configuring a system, or actually performing any technical task. Innovation and prosperity doesn’t soley result from the ‘usual tasks’. Let’s not forget about that.

Besides the example with the ‘numbers’, I still agree with the core message of your post. I think we need to find more efficient ways to achieve what a meeting is ‘supposed’ to do, which is…?

• Knowledge sharing
• Decision making
• [Please suggest others if missing…]

Meetings are a method for handling one or more of the above-mentioned goals. We should challenge ourselves to find new ways to have more efficient knowledge sharing and decision making processes. How can we do this, without those participants who don’t care, nor plan to participate in the decision making?

When these employees don’t participate in these meetings, they still need to be updated on the decisions (and sometimes the reasoning also). Some employees might even take ‘offence’ (we’re human after all) for not being invited to some meetings, while they might not even bother to actively participate in them.

Information sharing and decision making over email don't work either. Packed email inboxes, anyone? It seems that the meeting fatigue is a part of a much larger issue at hand. The ever growing information streams that we expect our employees to handle and numerous decision-making processes.