The Real Cost of Pointless Meetings: How Much Is Your Company Wasting?

How many meetings did you attend today? If you work at a Korean company, the answer is probably more than you'd like.

A survey by the Korea Employers Federation found that 56% of Korean workers feel they attend too many unnecessary meetings. Yet meeting culture persists, largely because the costs are invisible. No budget line. No receipt. Just hours disappearing from the calendar.

This article quantifies what unproductive meetings actually cost, explains why the problem is especially acute in the Korean work environment, and offers three practical ways to reclaim your team's time.

What Does a Meeting Actually Cost?

The formula is straightforward:

Meeting Cost = Number of Attendees × Average Hourly Rate × Duration

For a 10-person weekly meeting with an average salary of ₩50 million per year, the direct labor cost of a single one-hour session is approximately ₩240,000. Factor in benefits and overhead, and the real cost exceeds ₩300,000 per meeting.

Run that meeting every week for a year: ₩15.6 million — from a single recurring meeting.

Use the Timefair Meeting Cost Calculator to calculate your team's exact number in real time.

Meetings and Korea's 52-Hour Work Week

Under Korea's 주 52시간 근무제 (52-hour work week law), enforced since 2018, meeting time counts toward the legal weekly limit. Every hour spent in an unproductive meeting is an hour unavailable for actual work — which either compresses the workday or pushes tasks into overtime.

Reducing unnecessary meetings isn't just an efficiency preference. In a 52-hour framework, it's one of the most direct ways to protect your team's capacity and reduce after-hours work.

Three Ways to Make Meetings More Efficient

1. No agenda, no meeting. Every invite should state what decision needs to be made. If there's no clear decision, convert the meeting to a document.

2. Minimize attendees. "Just in case" invitations inflate cost without adding value. Keep attendance to those who must participate in the decision, and share a summary with everyone else.

3. Audit for async opportunities. Status updates, one-way briefings, and informational reports can often be replaced with a recorded video or a written summary — no synchronous meeting required.

For a deeper look at how overtime connects to meeting overload, try the Overtime Pay Calculator.

Start calculating your meeting costs now → Timefair Meeting Cost Calculator