Nobody schedules a meeting thinking they’re going to waste time. Yet most people who work in organisations will admit that a significant portion of their meetings could have been resolved with an email, or skipped entirely. Meetings, as a format, carry a cost that is systematically underestimated: not just the time of whoever called the meeting, but the sum of everyone who attends.
Learning to design a meeting well is, in that sense, a skill with collective impact.
The real cost of meetings
When someone schedules a one-hour meeting with five people, the real cost isn’t one hour — it’s five. Multiply that by the average hourly rate of those five people, and the economic cost of a single meeting can easily exceed a full day’s work for a junior employee.
This calculation isn’t meant to eliminate meetings — some work can only happen in shared time — but to make visible something that usually stays invisible. Meetings carry a cost that should be justified, in the same way any other use of resources is justified.
The most common dysfunction isn’t that there are too many meetings. It’s that there are too many poorly designed meetings: no clear objective, unnecessary participants, no structure, no concrete outcome at the end. They consume energy without generating progress.
Before scheduling: the question few ask
Before opening the calendar, there’s a question few people ask: does this actually need a meeting?
Some criteria for answering it:
You need a meeting when the task requires real-time negotiation, when you need non-verbal signals to move forward, when the decision involves people with different information that must be synchronised together, or when the problem is complex enough that exchanging documents won’t resolve it.
You don’t need a meeting when the communication is one-directional — a report, a status update — when the decision can be made asynchronously, or when the real goal is simply making sure everyone knows something.
The asynchronous alternative — a shared document, a short video message, a comment thread — is often more efficient and more respectful of everyone’s time.
If after this analysis the conclusion is that a meeting is genuinely needed, the next step is to design it so it’s worth what it costs.
The anatomy of an effective meeting
A well-designed meeting has three minimum elements before it starts:
A clear objective. Not a topic, but an objective. “Talk about project X” is a topic. “Decide whether to launch phase 2 of project X before 15 June” is an objective. The difference is significant: the second one lets you know when the meeting is over.
An agenda with times. Even a rough one — a list of points to cover with approximate time allocations — helps keep focus. Meetings without an agenda tend to expand to fill whatever time is available and drift toward comfortable topics rather than important ones.
The right participants. Each additional person in a meeting multiplies the cost and, beyond a certain number, reduces the efficiency of decision-making. For decisions, four or five people is enough. For informing fifteen, there is the written document. Including someone “just in case” is generous to the attendee and disrespectful of their time.
During: how to stay on track
Meetings go off the rails for two main reasons: the conversation drifts from the objective, or someone monopolises the time without moving the agenda forward.
Whoever calls or facilitates the meeting is responsible for holding the course. This doesn’t require formal authority — just clarity. Questions like “are we reaching any conclusion here?” or “can we note that point to address separately?” are enough to redirect a wandering conversation.
One specific practice that makes a real difference: designating someone to take notes in a defined format. Not comprehensive minutes — just three columns: decisions made, tasks assigned with name and date, and open questions still pending. With that record, the meeting produces a tangible output beyond the conversation itself.
The closing that makes the difference
The last few minutes of a meeting are usually the most important and the most neglected. The conversation has ended, but nobody has verified that there’s agreement on what was decided and what each person will do next.
An explicit close takes less than two minutes and resolves a great deal:
- What we decided.
- Who is doing what, and by when.
- If something requires another meeting, when and with whom.
Without this close, a well-run meeting can end in ambiguity. With it, participants leave with clarity on next steps. That clarity is, ultimately, what determines whether the meeting generated value or simply consumed shared time.
A forty-five-minute meeting with a clear objective, the right people and an explicit close is worth more than ninety minutes without any of those three things.
