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No one is expected to know how much their company spends on meetings.
Ask about cloud spend, hiring plans, or marketing budgets and you will get an answer immediately. Those costs are tracked, reviewed, and managed because they are understood to matter. Meetings are not, even though they consume a significant share of time across the organization and determine how work moves, or fails to.
Most employees spend a meaningful portion of their week in meetings. This is not a cultural quirk or a scheduling issue. It is a structural allocation of resources. The difference is that it is rarely measured, and almost never managed.
When translated into cost, the scale of coordination becomes difficult to ignore. Most knowledge workers now spend between 30% and 50% of their week in meetings, which means twelve to twenty hours spent aligning rather than executing. A one-hour meeting with six participants costs over four hundred dollars. For a single team running just a few meetings a day, that quickly adds up to more than $300,000 per year spent on coordination.
That is one team.
At the organizational level, the numbers become harder to overlook. In a company of 10,000 employees, even at 30% of time spent in meetings, the annual cost exceeds $400 million. And that still excludes preparation time, follow-up work, and the loss of focus that comes with constant interruption.
That number is not unusual. What is unusual is that no one manages it.
This dynamic is not unique to meetings. It mirrors what happens in every other cost category once it becomes visible.
When companies began tracking cloud spend, the impact was immediate. Research from organizations like the FinOps Foundation estimates that 20 to 40 percent of cloud usage is often wasted through idle or overprovisioned resources. Once that spend became visible and teams were given ownership over it, behavior changed. Resources were shut down. Architectures were reconsidered. The question shifted from expansion to justification.
The same pattern applies to every cost that is measured.
Behavior does not change because the work disappears. It changes because the cost becomes visible. Meetings are one of the only costs that operate outside of this system.
Despite this, meetings are not treated as a financial decision. Research consistently shows they are expanding, not contracting. Data from Microsoft indicates that meetings have more than tripled in recent years, while studies from Harvard Business Review and Asana show that a majority of time is now spent on coordination rather than execution.
Yet this growth exists without the constraints applied to nearly every other major cost category. There is no defined budget, no threshold for use, and no expectation of accountability. Meetings are scheduled without constraint, expanded without scrutiny, and justified implicitly rather than explicitly. The result is not simply that meetings exist, but that they expand.
It is often assumed that this expansion reflects the growing complexity of work. There are more stakeholders, more dependencies, and more information to process. While this is partially true, it does not explain why coordination consumes such a disproportionate amount of time. The underlying issue is not simply complexity, but how work is structured. This is not a productivity problem. It is a structural one we built.
Work did not become harder. It became fragmented.
And once work is fragmented, coordination becomes the work. Coordination is the hidden tax on work.
A single piece of work now exists across multiple systems at once. It may begin in a message, move into a document, appear on a calendar, and be tracked in a system of record. Each of these environments contains a fragment of the work, but none contains its full state. As a result, understanding what is happening requires moving across systems and reconstructing context.
This reconstruction is now a central part of the workday. Individuals spend time locating information, confirming ownership, and re-establishing shared understanding before action can take place. This effort is rarely recognized as work in itself, but it is necessary for work to proceed.
Meetings provide a temporary resolution to this fragmentation. They bring together information that is otherwise dispersed and allow participants to align on the state of the work. During a meeting, clarity is briefly restored. Decisions can be made with a shared understanding of context. Once the meeting ends, however, that clarity dissolves back into the systems where the work resides.
Alternative approaches, such as replacing meetings with written communication, do not eliminate this dynamic. In organizations like Amazon, structured memos are used to create clarity before discussion begins. While this improves the quality of decision-making, it does not remove the cost of coordination. Writing, reviewing, and aligning on a memo requires time and effort. The mechanism changes, but the need to reconstruct shared understanding remains.
The core issue is not whether meetings or memos are more effective. Both are responses to a deeper problem: the absence of a unified view of work that allows it to move without constant intervention.
Because this coordination is not treated as a cost, it is not managed as one. Meetings are scheduled without considering their cumulative impact. Additional participants are included without evaluating marginal cost. Time expands because there is no structural force requiring it to contract. In financial terms, this is unmanaged spend.
Introducing a meeting budget changes the nature of the decision. If each team is allocated a defined amount of coordination time or cost per month, meetings become a resource to be used deliberately rather than a default mechanism. A statement such as “your team has $15,000 in meeting spend this month” reframes scheduling as a tradeoff rather than an assumption.
Under such a system, meetings are not eliminated, but they are evaluated. The question shifts from whether a meeting is needed to whether it is worth the cost relative to other ways of moving the work forward. This creates pressure toward clearer ownership, more precise communication, and more selective use of synchronous time.
There are limits to this approach. Not all coordination can be reduced, and not all meetings are interchangeable. Certain decisions require real-time discussion, particularly when ambiguity or conflict is involved. A quota system, if applied rigidly, may discourage necessary alignment or shift coordination into other forms such as excessive documentation. The underlying fragmentation of work would still need to be addressed.
However, the value of a meeting budget is not that it solves coordination entirely, but that it makes its cost visible. Visibility introduces accountability, and accountability enables change. Without it, coordination remains an unbounded expense that grows in response to the very inefficiencies it creates.
Work has not slowed because people are less capable or less productive. It has slowed because the path from decision to action has become fragmented and extended. Meetings are not the problem. They are the compensation.
Until coordination is treated as a measurable and manageable cost, it will continue to expand. And as it expands, it will continue to shape how work moves, often more than the work itself.
Of course meetings are everywhere. They are the only place work actually comes together.
That is the problem.
