Too Many Project Meetings Because Nothing Else Shows Status: The Payroll Cost

The Monday status meeting that exists because nothing else shows status

A construction-services company in Gauteng runs eight active projects. Every Monday at eight, the project managers, the site foremen, the procurement officer and the finance clerk join a ninety-minute call. Each project manager recites where their project stands. Procurement says what has been ordered. Finance says what has been paid. By ten, everyone knows what everyone else knows, and the week can begin. On Wednesday, a second shorter call tidies up what changed. On Friday, a third call prepares for the Monday.

None of these meetings is held out of love for meetings. They are held because the information they exchange does not exist anywhere that people can look at it on their own. The status of each project sits in a manager's head, a spreadsheet on a laptop, or a WhatsApp group. The only way to bring it together is to bring the people together.

This article is about that specific pattern: projects that have too many meetings because information is not visible anywhere else, and the payroll cost of the coordination overhead that follows. It differs from meetings that end without decisions, where the meeting runs but nothing is settled. Here the meeting runs, and the decisions may be fine, but its main purpose is to transfer information that should already be visible.

A way to recognise a status-substitute meeting

Not every meeting is a symptom. Discussion, negotiation, problem-solving and relationship-building are good reasons to bring people together. The symptom is a meeting where most of the time is spent reading out facts. You can test your own calendar with a few questions.

• Does most of the meeting consist of each person taking a turn to report?
• Could the same facts be copied into a shared page in a few minutes?
• Do people leave with the same information they could have read before arriving?
• Does the meeting get longer as the number of projects grows?
• Is it cancelled only when someone has sent a summary by email, showing that the summary would have sufficed?
• Do attendees need to listen to the whole meeting to catch the two minutes that concern them?

A yes to several suggests that the meeting is carrying a load that visibility should carry.

The payroll arithmetic

The direct cost of a meeting is the hourly cost of everyone attending, multiplied by its length. The indirect cost is larger and harder to see.

1. Attendance cost. A ninety-minute meeting with nine people consumes thirteen and a half person-hours. Multiply by the weighted hourly cost of those staff, including benefits, for a first estimate. Repeat for every recurring meeting in the week.
2. Preparation cost. People spend time before the meeting assembling what they will say, often by chasing others for figures.
3. Fragmentation cost. A one-hour meeting in the middle of the morning rarely leaves two clear hours on either side. Focused work is broken into pieces too small for complex tasks.
4. Follow-up cost. Minutes are written, circulated, queried and corrected. Actions agreed verbally are re-explained by email.
5. Staleness cost. Information read out on Monday is out of date by Wednesday, which prompts the second meeting.

Using a modest set of assumptions, say nine people, a weighted cost of R350 an hour and three recurring status meetings of varying length totalling four hours a week, the direct cost approaches R50,000 a month before preparation and fragmentation are counted. These figures are illustrative, so replace them with your own. The point is to give the cost a number, so that it can be compared with the cost of setting up a shared view.

In South Africa, working time also has a legal frame. The Basic Conditions of Employment Act regulates ordinary hours of work and overtime. Where status meetings push real work into evenings, the company may pay for the same output twice, once in the meeting and once in the overtime that follows.

What visibility replaces

The alternative is not to ban meetings. It is to move factual updates to a place people can read in their own time, and keep the live conversation for what only conversation can do. Microsoft's documentation on Teams channels describes organising conversation, files and tools around a project or topic, and its overview of Teams describes the same idea at workspace level. Many other tools do the same job. A shared project page needs only a few elements.

The minimum useful project page

When this page exists and is kept current, the Monday call changes character. Everyone has read it. The call opens with "which projects are at risk?" and spends its time on those. It may shrink from ninety minutes to thirty, or from weekly to fortnightly. The page also serves the people who were not invited. A related cost, that of managers chasing individual updates, is covered in managers chasing status updates.

Why the page often fails, and how to avoid it

The usual cause of failure is that updating the page feels like extra work on top of the meeting. If people still have to attend the meeting and update the page, they will drop the page. The fix is sequence. Announce a trial in which the meeting is replaced, not supplemented: the page is the update, and the call is only for exceptions. Another cause is too many fields. Start with the six above and add only when people ask. A third is the lack of an owner, so name one person responsible for keeping the page honest, and let them gently chase anyone whose status is stale.

There is also a trust question. People may feel safer reporting problems in person than in writing, where they stay on record. Make the blocked or at-risk status explicitly normal, and respond to it with help rather than criticism. The page works only if it is honest. A page where everything is green, until suddenly it is not, will be ignored.

Practical next actions

1. List every recurring project meeting this month, with its length and attendees, and mark which ones are mostly people reading out status.
2. Calculate the monthly attendance cost of those meetings using your own weighted hourly cost, and write the number where the leadership team will see it.
3. Create one shared page per project with the six items above, and appoint an owner for each page who updates it before a fixed time each week.
4. Run a four-week trial in which the largest status meeting is shortened to exceptions only, with everyone expected to have read the pages in advance.
5. After the trial, compare hours spent, decisions made and surprises discovered late, and keep whichever format served the projects better.

Meetings are valuable when people need to think together. They are expensive when they are the only place where facts can be found. For more on the broader cost of this pattern, see the meeting that could have been a shared record.

Sources and further reading

• Overview of teams and channels in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams
• Introduction to Microsoft Teams for admins - Microsoft Teams

Related Mellorca reading

• Deadlines Slip When Dependencies Are Hidden: What Avoidable Delay Costs
• "On Track" Until It Isn't: The Cost of Discovering Delays Too Late
• Too Many Apps to Learn: The Hidden Training and Productivity Cost of Software Overload