Meet the Meeting Miser

Track the true cost of meetings

It's a cliché in every workplace: Meetings can be a waste of time. Well if
that's true, they're a big financial drain, too. Ever wondered how much? The
folks at PayScale have — and they can
figure it out for any business meeting, anywhere. Meet the Meeting Miser, a
handy new management tool for BNET users: Type in the titles and locations of
all your attendees, click the Start button, and the Miser runs a tab of your
meeting's actual cost, as measured by the median salaries of everybody in the
room. (PayScale, the Seattle-based compensation research firm, knows. Its
database includes over 10 million user-submitted salary profiles across
hundreds of industries.) A regional sales manager in New York, for instance,
wants to round up five account executives for an hour-long strategy huddle? That's a $379 conversation.

Use the Meeting Miser at BNET

Want to start clocking your meetings and conference calls? Go to www.payscale.com/meeting-miser and turn on the Miser from time to time. But stop-watching your
office confabs won't necessarily make them more effective — an expensive
meeting is a symptom, not a cure.

Other ways to improve meetings

To make your meetings worth every dollar, start with href="http://www.bnet.com/2406-13059_23-61212.html">BNET's step-by-step guide
to better meetings, "Make Your Meetings Matter,". We show you a handful of
alternative meeting
methods, what to do
when meetings go bad, and href="http://www.bnet.com/2403-13056_23-61203.html"> how to improve those
hard-to-manage teleconferences.