Meeting effectiveness and cost

Estimate attendance cost as attendees multiplied by meeting duration in hours and average hourly cost, then add total preparation and follow-up team-hours at the same or a separately modelled rate. Multiply by annual frequency for recurring cost, and document whether salary overhead and other expenses are included.

The result is an estimate. Mixed salaries, opportunity cost, technology, travel, tax, and asynchronous work may require a more detailed model.

Cost per documented decision divides estimated meeting cost by the number of decisions recorded in a reviewable form. It is descriptive, not a target: some meetings should produce no decision, and counting trivial decisions can make the metric look better without increasing value.

Used well, this metric supports a conversation rather than a scorecard verdict. A steadily rising cost-per-decision over several months might mean the meeting has grown beyond its useful size, that decisions are being deferred to a smaller follow-up conversation instead of being made in the room, or simply that the group is now handling harder problems than it was a quarter ago. The number should prompt that question, not answer it by itself.

Cost per confirmed action divides estimated meeting cost by actions whose owners have accepted the commitment. Separating confirmed actions from AI-inferred or facilitator-assigned tasks prevents an activity count from overstating actual ownership. Pair the metric with completion, dispute, and ageing information.

A meeting with no decision or confirmed action is not automatically wasteful. Discovery, relationship-building, incident awareness, learning, and sensitive discussion can have value without immediate execution. Review whether the intended purpose was achieved and whether risks or open questions should still have been recorded.

A weekly leadership meeting runs for one hour with eight attendees at a blended average cost of A$95 per hour, plus an estimated three team-hours of preparation and follow-up at the same rate. The base calculation looks like this:

• Attendance cost: 8 attendees × 1 hour × A$95 = A$760.
• Preparation and follow-up: 3 hours × A$95 = A$285.
• Total estimated cost per occurrence: A$1,045.
• Annualised at 48 occurrences a year: roughly A$50,160.

That meeting typically produces two documented decisions and three confirmed actions (where "confirmed" means the named owner has accepted the commitment, not merely that an AI system proposed it). Cost per documented decision is roughly A$523; cost per confirmed action is roughly A$348. On their own these numbers say little. They become useful when tracked over several months alongside completion and dispute rates: a rising cost-per-confirmed-action trend with falling completion suggests the meeting is generating more activity without more accountable follow-through, which is a more actionable signal than the raw cost figure.

• Estimated meeting, preparation, and follow-up cost.
• Documented decisions and confirmed actions.
• Open risks and questions that received owners.
• Overdue, disputed, or superseded outcomes.
• Time from meeting to owner confirmation.
• Participant assessment of whether the meeting purpose was met.

• Treating cost as the only variable that matters. A meeting can be expensive and still worthwhile, or cheap and still ineffective; cost needs to be read alongside documented outcomes, not instead of them.
• Counting AI-proposed actions as confirmed. An action an AI system extracted but the owner never accepted is not the same as a confirmed commitment; blending the two inflates the apparent output of a meeting.
• Comparing cost-per-decision across unlike meetings. A discovery session and a decision-making meeting serve different purposes; comparing their cost-per-decision figures directly produces a misleading ranking.
• Ignoring meetings with zero recorded outcomes. Some meetings — incident briefings, relationship-building, sensitive discussions — are not supposed to produce decisions; scoring them as ineffective misreads their purpose.
• Presenting an estimate as measured savings. A calculated cost figure is a planning input, not proof of waste or of realised savings, unless it is tied to an actual before-and-after baseline.

Do not present estimated labour cost as measured waste or claim savings without a defined baseline and observed result.