The Meeting Trap
In projects, people discuss budgets, deadlines, and resources. What rarely gets written down: what the weekly meetings themselves cost.
That sounds like a minor point. It is not.
Let us do the math.
An experienced engineer at a German industrial company costs around 150 euros per hour internally. This is not a freelance rate, but a fully loaded internal cost calculation: gross salary, employer contributions, overhead, infrastructure. For reference: according to data compiled by GULP and Randstad Professional, the average hourly rate for freelance engineers and designers already stood at 99 euros at the start of 2024 [1]. That is the lower bound. For a salaried engineer at a large company with the corresponding cost structure, the internal fully loaded rate sits considerably higher.
So let us take 150 euros as the baseline.
If this engineer spends four hours a day in meetings, half of which they could have skipped, that is 300 euros of burned working time per day. 1,500 euros per week. Over 6,000 euros per month. For one person.
In a project team of ten engineers with a similar meeting load, that adds up to over 60,000 euros per month. Not invested in the product. Not spent on problem-solving. Not on development. Simply burned.
These costs appear in no budget plan. There is no line item called “unnecessary meetings” in the project calculation. But they are real, and they show up in the product in the end.
In large industrial companies, cost awareness around individual working hours is often abstract. Nobody directly feels the pain of a burned hour. Revenue from existing products is so large and so globally distributed that one burned engineering hour simply does not register in day-to-day operations.
That changes only when a project runs off the rails, either in terms of time or cost. Then tools are deployed to rebuild pace: tight tracking, intensive steering, hard prioritization. These are not signs of a functioning cost culture. They are reactions to a problem that has been building quietly for months. The hours burned in pointless meetings were part of it.
I have seen this firsthand in large projects. The connection between time that disappears daily into unnecessary calls and the problems that surface months later is real. It is just very hard to see while it is happening.
In mid-sized companies, this connection surfaces faster. Not because the owner thinks more efficiently by nature, but because the structures are leaner and mistakes become visible sooner. A burned engineering hour shows up more directly in the project calculation because there are no large product volumes to absorb it.
At a large industrial company, it takes longer for the damage to become visible. By the time it does, the next project is already in trouble.
The first measure costs nothing: once a month, put all recurring meetings on the table and ask one single question. Does this meeting actually need to happen, and does every person on the invite actually need to be there?
Anyone who does this consistently will usually find fairly quickly that a significant share of meeting time can be replaced by something simpler, faster, and cheaper. A clear set of minutes. A short status update. A structured message.
The employee would often rather work efficiently. They cannot, because they are in the next meeting.
[1] GULP / Randstad Professional (2024). Hourly rates of freelance engineers and designers. gulp.de/freelancing/wissen/finanzen/stundensatz-konstrukteure
In many companies, this is exactly where unnecessary time losses and structural problems arise. Often this goes unnoticed for a long time — until projects start to stall.
