Matter

Problem statement

The average professional spends 21.5 hours in meetings each week, that's half a work week! Public servants are not spared from this, and are often caught in many long (maybe even unnecessary) meetings like that too.

Objective

By showing the actual cost of a meeting, and a contextualised opportunity cost in terms of taxpayers' money, we aim to nudge public officers to re-consider their meeting time spend.

Research and approach

We found that we were not the only ones who found this a problem, or thought of such a solution. There are several meeting cost calculators out there, some even built by other governments! But, we wanted to go a step beyond calculating meeting costs to actually showcase the opportunity cost of each meeting in terms of taxpayers' money. We did some research to figure out what opportunity cost actually looks like and decided to contextualise it in terms of community benefits like CDC vouchers and Edusave bursaries.

Solution overview

We built a chrome extension that combines employee cost (i.e. salary) with the meeting duration to derive meeting costs. This meeting cost is displayed together with an opportunity cost on the meeting invite.

Outcomes and impact

The extension has since been used in various meetings within OGP (e.g. Manager Training and Friday Closers) to remind everyone the importance of being punctual for meetings and staying focused.

Next steps and future vision

We hope to roll out our extension to more government organisations. In future iterations, we hope to build out dashboard views that breaks down each organisations' spend on meetings. Reach out to us to find out more!