Working time: expensive and inefficient? This is how much your last meeting cost

Corporate Germany sits and talks. But many meetings deliver little output. The Handelsblatt calculator helps you to better estimate the costs of meetings - and to conduct them more efficiently.

Berlin. 64 billion euros are wasted in Germany every year due to inefficient meetings. The meeting software company Doodle already came to this rough projection in its “State of Meetings Report 2019”. Adjusted for inflation, this is now around 80 billion euros, according to Handelsblatt calculations.

With a new calculator, Handelsblatt allows you to determine the costs of meetings - including a rough estimate of the inefficiency of the meeting. Tips from business also show how the efficiency of meetings can be increased.

The central number that Handelsblatt uses to estimate the inefficiency of meetings is the number of participants. A study by Microsoft researchers provides the basis for this. Using online meetings, the researchers examined the influence of various parameters on the perceived involvement and efficiency of meetings. The data set behind this study is considered one of the largest in the field.

According to this study, the perceived inclusivity and the efficiency of a meeting are highly correlated. That's why the Handelsblatt equated the inclusivity of a meeting, as perceived by the individual, with the efficiency of a meeting. And therefore the number of participants is by far the largest influencing factor on inclusivity and meeting efficiency.

A meeting for two or three people is rated as inclusive by more than 90 percent of those surveyed; From six people onwards, this perception drops to 67 percent. If there are more than 15 people, only a third of the participants say that they felt welcomed and therefore perceived the meeting as efficient.

Lev Tankelevitch, one of the study authors, puts it this way: "Fewer people doesn't automatically make it a better meeting. But it has to be clear to everyone why they're taking part."

And this reason for participation is more obvious to the individual in smaller meetings, and satisfaction with small meetings is therefore greater. Additionally, smaller meetings have a higher chance of participation, and this also leads to greater perceived efficiency.

Some companies have therefore set fixed rules for meeting sizes. Jeff Bezos decided for Amazon that there should never be more people in a meeting than two pizzas could feed - i.e. eight people.

Bayer handles things in a similar way. Nisha Mahendrarajan from Bayer's meeting culture core team believes another principle is even more important: "If you can't contribute anything to a meeting or get nothing from it, you can politely leave the meeting early."

Many employees were very surprised when Mahendrarajan and her colleagues calculated what the company could save if everyone spent an hour less in meetings every week. “We’re talking about 124 million euros here – so you can really save money,” she says. This is precisely why efficient meetings are so important.

In addition to the number of participants, there are other factors that studies have shown have an impact on meeting efficiency, such as: Was there an agenda? Did the meeting start and end on time?

Companies like Microsoft have aligned their meeting policies with these findings and have also published these policies. And Bayer is in the process of distributing a similar catalog throughout the group.

The meeting computer cannot therefore represent an irrefutable, calculated truth about the exchange in the office. Rather, it is intended to provide a scientific basis for an all-too-well-known question: Was this meeting really necessary? Or wouldn't an email have been enough?