Proof that badly scheduled meetings hurt productivity?

Question

I have a friend who is a developer. He is very stressed out by his manager, who seems addicted to meetings. The volume of meetings is a problem, but what is more of a problem is that they are spaced out evenly throughout the day. Meening that there is sometimes only an hour between one ending and the next starting. Often they are moved or canceled at the last minute. I and my friend know that this is bad for productivity, but the manager seems to be oblivious. Does anyone have a definitive easy to understand explanation that shows how damaging to productivity this?Ideally showing just how destructive it is. Something that looks scientific and has hard figures (even pictures) but doesn't go into too much detail will be good.

Answer 1

The simplest answer is to establish the cost of the meetings. You could say that they cost P (avg. hourly payroll) times N (number employees) times the number of hours per day. Say that six $25/hr employees spend four hours per day in meetings. This is $600 per day or about $3000/wk or $150,000/yr. Do the meetings improve the business by $150,000 each year?

That's really the question.

Patient Professor Bill