How Many Meetings Does a Georgian Company Hold Unnecessarily?

A one-hour meeting with eight employees does not cost one hour. It consumes eight person-hours. If held every week, it uses 384 person-hours a year. At Georgia’s average business-sector wage in the first quarter of 2026, its direct payroll cost is about GEL 5,100 – before office, technology, preparation, context switching and opportunity costs.

The problem is not that companies have meetings. Meetings create value when people must make a joint decision, resolve ambiguity or coordinate interdependent action. The problem begins when a meeting becomes an expensive ritual for reading information aloud, demonstrating activity or redistributing responsibility.

Georgia has no representative statistics on the time companies spend in meetings. BTU researchers therefore built a transparent scenario model: if employees spend a given number of hours in meetings each week, and part of that time is low-value or avoidable, how many working hours and how much direct payroll cost does a company lose?

The base result: 100 employees, 5,760 hours

The base case assumes four meeting hours per employee per week, of which 30 per cent can be cancelled, shortened or replaced by written asynchronous communication. It uses 48 working weeks and 176 working hours per month. These are not official Georgian statistics; they are conservative assumptions that each company can replace with its own calendar data.

Table 1. BTU researchers’ base scenario, using the Q1 2026 average monthly business-sector wage of GEL 2,335.9. One full working year equals 1,920 hours.

A 100-person company may therefore be allocating the annual working time of three full-time employees to the low-value portion of meetings. This is not an argument for removing three jobs. It is an argument for redirecting the same team’s capacity toward customers, sales, analysis, product improvement and execution.

The price differs sharply by sector

The value of a meeting hour depends on who attends. In Q1 2026, Georgia’s average monthly business-sector wage was GEL 2,335.9. It reached GEL 4,358.6 in information and communication and GEL 3,632.7 in professional, scientific and technical activities. The same 5,760 lost hours can therefore cost almost twice as much in a high-wage knowledge sector.

Table 2. Calculations by BTU researchers. Only direct gross payroll value is included.

Three scenarios, not one false national number

Table 3. These assumptions are scenarios, not survey findings, and are intended to be replaced with company-level data.

Why meeting bloat develops in Georgian organizations

Meeting overload is usually not a calendar problem. It is a clarity problem. When employees do not know where final information lives, who owns a decision or how progress should be documented, a meeting becomes the safest communication channel.

Several features of Georgia’s business environment may reinforce this behaviour. In many small and medium-sized firms, decisions are concentrated around a founder or a small leadership group. Written procedures are limited, responsibility is embedded in personal relationships, and attendance can be interpreted as loyalty or engagement. Declining an unnecessary invitation may therefore feel like rejecting hierarchy rather than protecting productive time.

Status meetings add another layer: people repeat information that could have been shared in a concise written update. Attendee lists expand because people are invited to be informed, not to contribute. Meetings then end without a named decision, owner and deadline, producing yet another meeting on the same subject.

Not every meeting that could be an email should be an email

Complex, conflict-sensitive or high-risk decisions often benefit from live discussion. Meetings also help new employees learn unwritten organizational rules. Strategy, creative work and crisis response can require synchronous exchange. The goal is therefore not to halve meetings mechanically, but to move person-hours toward meetings whose value exceeds their cost.

How a company can measure its own loss

Run a four-week calendar audit. For every meeting, record duration, attendance, participants’ approximate hourly compensation, purpose and final decision. The direct formula is: meeting duration × number of attendees × average hourly compensation.

Participants should then rate return on time invested from one to five. Split ratings often show that a meeting is valuable to some attendees but not to others. Classify meetings into four groups: retain, shorten, replace asynchronously or cancel.

A meeting objective should begin with a verb

‘Budget discussion’ does not define an outcome. ‘Approve the Q2 budget’ does. ‘Project update’ can continue indefinitely; ‘finalize three priority features’ creates a stopping point. A company can also test a rule of halves: reduce duration, cadence, agenda items or attendance by 50 per cent for one month and compare decision quality and execution speed. If outcomes do not deteriorate, the previous volume was unnecessary.

AI should replace meeting load, not merely document it

Transcription and summaries are useful, but a good summary of a bad meeting does not remove the waste. Higher-value AI applications collect updates in advance, consolidate repetitive status information, maintain a decision register, track owners and deadlines, and detect recurring meetings that repeatedly revisit the same issue.

In an agentic management model, an AI agent can act as a pre-meeting filter: determine whether synchronous discussion is necessary, prepare context, suggest the essential attendees and convert decisions into tasks afterward. Authority and accountability must remain grounded in a clear human mandate and oversight.

Conclusion

The hidden price of meetings for a Georgian company can reach tens of thousands of lari and hundreds of workdays. According to BTU researchers’ base estimate, low-value meetings in a 100-person firm consume approximately 5,760 hours and GEL 76,400 a year. In the higher-paid information and communication sector, the same time is worth about GEL 142,600.

But payroll is only the visible cost. Meetings fragment focused work, delay execution and create the illusion that conversation itself is progress. The right question is not simply how many meetings to cancel. It is which meetings create more value than the collective time invested in them.

Methodological note

The model uses Geostat’s Q1 2026 gross monthly wage data, 176 working hours per month and 48 working weeks per year. The base case assumes four weekly meeting hours and a 30 per cent low-value share; low and high cases vary both assumptions. The calculation includes direct gross payroll value only. It excludes taxes and employer costs, preparation, context switching, delayed decisions and lost revenue. Georgia has no representative national meeting-use survey, so the results are scenarios rather than a national estimate.

Prepared by the academic team of Business and Technology University and the BTUAI Research Team, Tbilisi, Georgia.