An article on the business2community.com website explains the main reasons why business meetings can be very costly. The basic rule is simple: people who are at a meeting should provide value or gain value from it.
Participants who shouldn’t be there
Business meetings unnecessarily devour too many resources. If it isn't a board meeting, or a group decision isn't needed, chances are that most people who are present actually don’t have to be sitting there. By using technology, adding participants is a simple matter of clicking. Quite often, more people are added with sole purpose of making the meeting seem more important.
If little get accomplished, it only takes a one-hour meeting with eight people present, and you've just wasted one workday in terms of salary. Since the costs of meetings are multiplied by the number of people present, inefficient meetings can turn out to be very ineffective for a company.
Lack of formal organization and planning
Many meeting organizers fail to give their meetings a formal structure before it starts. So generally speaking, that's another reason why meetings can be unproductive.
Participants aren't paying attention
The truth is that we've all daydreamed during a meeting, right? It's not common to have active contributions from everyone who in attendance (especially in case of conference calls).
That time you and others are not engaged is time wasted. Very often, people aren’t engaged for a good reason – they simply shouldn’t be there, since it doesn’t provide them with any real value.
-jk-