Answer 6 quick questions about your upcoming meeting. We will tell you whether it is worth the salary cost or if everyone's time would be better spent elsewhere.
Get the free Meeting Cost Audit Kit and a copy of this result you can forward to your team.
If you decide to keep the meeting, at least know the price tag.
Open Meeting Cost CalculatorAtlassian's research found that 80% of workers believe they would be more productive with fewer meetings. Meanwhile, only 11% of meetings get rated as "highly productive" by the people attending them. The disconnect is massive.
The problem is not that meetings are inherently bad. It is that most organizations default to scheduling a meeting when a Slack message, an email, or a shared document would accomplish the same thing faster and cheaper. Shopify recognized this pattern and famously purged thousands of recurring meetings from their calendars in 2023, building an internal meeting cost calculator to make the expense visible.
We built this quiz based on the decision frameworks that workplace researchers and productivity experts consistently recommend. The questions map to the specific factors that research links to whether a meeting will be productive or wasteful: the need for real time interaction, the presence of a clear decision, the size of the invite list, and whether an agenda exists.
A 30 minute meeting with 6 people earning an average of $85,000 per year costs roughly $159 in loaded salary. If it is a weekly recurring meeting, that is $8,268 per year. For a single meeting. If that meeting could have been an email that took 5 minutes to write and 2 minutes to read, the organization just wasted over $8,000 annually on what is essentially an expensive group email reading session.
Use our meeting cost calculator to see the exact numbers for your specific situation. The guide to reducing meeting costs covers seven practical strategies for cutting this waste. And our agenda template ensures that the meetings you do keep are structured for maximum value.
If the main job is sharing status, collecting lightweight input, or broadcasting context, it usually belongs in an email, Slack thread, or shared doc. Missing agenda, fuzzy purpose, and bloated invite lists are all hints that the live version is doing broadcast work instead of decision work. That is where the meeting audit template helps most.
Keep the meeting when you need fast disagreement resolution, a sensitive conversation, or a live decision with a clear owner in the room. In those cases, tighten the structure with the meeting agenda template, document the outcome with the meeting minutes template, and if your team spans time zones, use Goldhour to pick a humane slot.