What is team time worth?
Meetings, prep, and coordination make team time expensive. This tool helps quantify that cost.
Team Basics
Let's start with your team's current situation. This information is only used for calculation purposes and is not stored or saved anywhere.
How much is your team's time worth?
The arithmetic is straightforward: take the fully loaded monthly cost of one person, multiply by twelve and by the number of people, divide by the hours they work. Ten people at 8,000 a month working 40-hour weeks cost roughly 480 for every hour they spend together. A recurring weekly hour with all ten of them in it is a five-figure annual line item that appears on no budget anywhere.
That is what team time costs. What it is worth to you is a different number, and the calculator above gets at it by asking five questions that have nothing to do with payroll. The distance between the two is the useful part.
Six ways to price a team hour
1. The actual cost
What does the team cost per person, per hour, and how many of you are there?
(monthly cost per person × 12 × team size) ÷ (hours per week × 50 work weeks)
Fully loaded cost, not salary: taxes, benefits, and everything else the company pays. This is the only figure in the calculator that is arithmetic rather than judgement.
2. Your meeting prep rate
How many minutes would you spend preparing to make a one-hour team meeting 20% better?
(prep minutes ÷ minutes saved across the team) × the team's hourly cost
Preparation is one person's time spent to buy back everyone else's. What you are willing to invest reveals how you price the room.
3. Your tooling rate
What would you pay per month for a tool that saves each person two hours a week?
(monthly price ÷ the real cost of those hours) × the team's hourly cost
A ratio, not a price. Paying well below the cost of the hours saved means you are pricing the team's time below what it costs.
4. Your approval rate
How many people can you pull into a meeting, and how much can you spend, without asking?
(spend limit ÷ the cost of that many people's hour) × the team's hourly cost
Most organisations guard money far more carefully than calendars. The gap between the two thresholds is the clearest signal of how an organisation really values time.
5. Your outsourcing rate
What would you pay to hand a two-week team project to someone who needs no supervision?
the amount you would pay ÷ the team hours it would have taken
The price you would pay to buy back a block of team time, with the coordination overhead removed.
6. Your travel rate
What would you pay to save the whole team one hour of travel?
the amount you name, used directly
Travel is time the team cannot use for anything else, which makes it the cleanest hour to put a price on.
Why you get two numbers, not one
The first figure is what an hour of team time costs the company. The second is what you behave as though it is worth, taken from the five judgement questions: they are sorted and the middle ones averaged, so a single extreme answer cannot drag the result around. Framing effects are strong, and the questions are deliberately framed differently from each other.
When the perceived figure lands well below the actual cost, as it commonly does, it means the team fills hours it would never spend the equivalent money on. That is why a fifteen-person recurring meeting survives for years while a subscription a tenth of its cost needs three approvals.
What to do with the number
- Price the recurring meetings. Take the standing meetings on the calendar, multiply attendees by hours by the rate, and annualise it. The result usually decides which ones survive without further discussion.
- Match the two thresholds. If you can book twenty people for an hour without approval but not spend 200 without a form, the approval process is not protecting the expensive resource.
- Build the tooling case in team hours. A tool that saves each person twenty minutes a week is a large annual number once it is multiplied by headcount, and that framing survives a budget review better than a feature list.
- Check it against where the hours go. The estimate is only as good as your sense of how the team actually spends its week, which is the part almost nobody has data on. That is what DoneThat measures.
Common questions
How do I calculate the cost of a meeting?
Multiply each attendee's fully loaded hourly cost by the length of the meeting, and add the preparation and the recovery time either side of it. For anything recurring, multiply by the number of times it happens in a year. The annual figure is the one that changes behaviour; the per-meeting figure rarely does.
Should I use salary or fully loaded cost?
Fully loaded, which is typically 1.25 to 1.4 times salary once employer taxes, benefits, equipment, and workspace are included. Using bare salary understates every result here by a third, and it is the wrong basis anyway: the company pays the loaded number whether the hour produces anything or not.
Why is the perceived value lower than the actual cost?
Because team time is a shared resource nobody is individually billed for. Spending 500 of budget requires a decision by a named person; spending 500 worth of other people's attention requires a calendar invite. The absence of friction is what makes the perceived price low.
How is this different from the individual calculator?
The individual version asks what an hour of your own life is worth, so it is anchored on what you would pay or accept personally. This one is anchored on what an hour costs an employer and multiplied by headcount, which makes coordination (meetings, handovers, and waiting on each other) the dominant term instead of a rounding error.