Meeting Meter^™

Meeting Meter is a taxi meter for meetings - an amusing, but remarkably effective tool for increasing awareness of the "meetings problem." The Wall Street Journal said it's "just the product for all those companies who want to make their meetings more productive..." 

Before the meeting starts, type in your educated guess of your meeting costs (see below). The message is plainly and painfully obvious, dollar after dollar after dollar. 

"Long, unproductive meetings are the scourge of the business world. Now there's a software package [Meeting Meter] to shut up the windbags by reminding everyone that time really is money." -Business Week

"Face-to-face communication often gets in the way of what youïre trying to get done,' says Bernard De Koven, a consultant best known for inventing the Meeting Meter, a device that calculates the cost of lengthy, overpopulated meetings. " - Newsweek

According to a study by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (Forbes, 10/25/93) 

• The average meeting takes place in the company conference room at 11 in the morning and lasts an hour and 30 minutes. 
• It is attended by nine people -- two managers, four co-workers, two subordinates and one outsider -- who have received two hour prior notification 
• It has no written agenda, and its purported purpose is complete only 50% of the time. 
• A quarter of meeting participants complain they waste between 11 and 25 percent of the time discussing irrelevant issues 
• A full third of them feel pressured to publicly espouse opinions with which they privately disagree 
• Another third feel they have minimal or no influence on the discussion 
• Although 36% of meetings result in a "complete" resolution of the topic at hand, participants considered only one percent of those conclusions to be particularly creative. 
• A whopping 63% of meeting attendees feel that underlying issues outside the scope of the official agenda are the real subjects under discussion. 
• Senior executives spend 53% of their time in meetings, at an average rate of $320 per person hour.

And then, to rub it in a little deeper, consider the cost to the entire organization. Check out the Cost Calculator from Effective Meetings. And read Dr. Chris Avery's article Fads and Gimmicks. What Will They Think of Next.

For more about meeting costs, you can read Robert C. Brenner's article in the PMA newsletter.