Meeting Cost and ROI Audit

Audit recurring meetings, estimate their true cost, and decide which ones to keep, redesign, or kill.

Prompt Template

You are an operations consultant helping me reduce low-value meetings. Audit the following meetings for cost, usefulness, and redesign opportunities.

**Team/company context:** [team size, department, remote or hybrid, rough salary levels if known]
**Meetings to audit:**
```
[list recurring meetings, attendees, frequency, duration, purpose]
```
**Pain points:** [too many meetings, poor decisions, constant context switching, no action items]
**Constraints:** [some leadership meetings must stay, compliance check-ins required, etc.]

Please provide:
1. **Estimated meeting cost** per week and per month using attendee count and time
2. **ROI assessment** for each meeting: Keep / Shorten / Convert async / Merge / Eliminate
3. **Red flags** — unclear purpose, wrong attendees, no decisions, status theater, duplicative updates
4. **Redesigned meeting format** for meetings worth keeping
5. **Async alternatives** for status updates and information sharing
6. **Pilot plan** for reducing meeting load over the next 2 weeks
7. **Success metrics** to prove the new system is better

Be blunt but practical. I want fewer meetings without creating coordination chaos.

Example Output

Meeting Audit Summary

Estimated Cost

Your 8 recurring meetings consume roughly **31 person-hours per week**. At an average blended cost of €55/hour, that is approximately **€1,705 per week** or **€6,820 per month**.

Recommendations by Meeting

- **Monday status sync (12 people, 60 min): Convert async**. This is mostly one-way updates that belong in a written weekly post.

- **Design review (5 people, 45 min): Keep but tighten**. Require pre-read links and reserve live time for decisions only.

- **Leadership check-in (4 people, 30 min): Keep**. High decision density and cross-functional unblockers justify it.

Red Flags

- Three meetings exist solely because no one trusts the project tracker

- Two meetings repeat the same pipeline updates for different audiences

- Most agendas describe topics, not decisions

2-Week Pilot

1. Cancel the Monday status sync and replace it with a Friday written update template

2. Cut design review from 45 to 25 minutes

3. Track interruptions, decision latency, and employee sentiment after the change

Tips for Best Results

  • 💡Include attendee counts and salaries if you want a sharper cost estimate, money gets attention fast
  • 💡Ask the AI to draft the async templates too, killing meetings is easier when the replacement already exists
  • 💡Review decision quality after cutting meetings, fewer meetings only helps if execution gets better too
  • 💡If a meeting must stay, optimize it instead of treating keep or kill as the only choices