Do try this at work: the Meeting Cost Calculator 🖩 🧪
Shopify was in the news recently for adding estimated meeting cost to their calendar invites and this really piqued my interest 🤔 The response to this move has been mixed with some applauding, others critical, and some good arguments on both sides.
Yet we can’t know with certainty if costing our meetings will have a positive, negative or neutral impact as this is highly contextual and impossible to predict. That’s because this problem space sits firmly in the complex realm, where context is king and unintended consequences are likely.
Will it reduce meeting volume? Increase focus? Affect the quality? Lead to shorter, rushed meetings? All we know with certainty is that the results will differ in each context.
The upshot - there’s only one way to find out if costing meetings will help or hinder and that’s by trying! So if you are curious about having sight of the cost of your meetings and the impact this will have on your team/org, here’s a no-cost, low-energy experiment that you can try 🧪:
Make a copy of this meeting cost calculator (File > Make a copy).
Propose that your team uses it for a week/month.
Hold a ‘retro’ to reflect on whether this data helped or hindred your meeting culture.
If it helped, continue; if it hindered or made no difference, ditch it.
Let me know how it went - I’d love to hear!
Support me
☕ If you find this useful and would like to support me to create more free stuff, you’re very welcome to fuel me with coffee: https://ko-fi.com/newwaysofworking
Support for you
If your team/org could use some support, training or guidance to move away from traditional top-down ways of working then hit reply and we’ll schedule a call to see how I can help.
I offer training on:
Healthy *meetings*
Participatory *decision-making*
Growing a culture of *feedback*
New Ways of Working (NWOW) *101*.
And a free NWOW *Playbook demo* / Lunch & Learn.
Just let me know if any of these match a current need - I’d love to help 😊
🌐 www.marco.work | LinkedIn | 📕 New Ways of Working Playbook