By Nathesh
TMCnet Contributor
2MuchTalk, a free and simple-to-use app has been launched to help managers and SME businesses to learn about the true cost of meetings to their business. Through the tool’s auditing features businesses can enhance their meeting efficiency and stem an often-unnoticed financial and productivity drain. It has been estimated that in U.K. alone the true cost of meetings can be thousands of pounds per year for a small business – and total many millions across the economy. According to a release, the true cost of meetings comes from unacknowledged overheads, lost productivity, the actual time absorbed and acceptance of arbitrary meeting lengths. Businesses were in need of a new tool that can help them capture and see those costs and thus drive more efficient behavior. 2MuchTalk, the free meeting management tool assists in better planning of business meetings, runs more efficiently and reviews the real cost of an activity. It helps businesses to plan and think about meetings on the basis of Cost and not Time. The annual cost of each single person on a U.K. average salary attending a weekly 1 hour meeting ranges between $836 (approx) and $1187 (approx). Meetings are a common denominator across the UK’s 1.2 million companies, and each and every day they are responsible for creating staggering time wastage and loss of productivity. 2MuchTalk’s features enable capture of key meeting costs by: capturing the costs of the meeting room and other services such as catering; incorporating the cost of each participant by their actual or estimated annual salary; further defining participants by their point of origin, to reflect other costs of attendance, as travel costs, time spent travelling and accommodation; logging attendees in or out of the meeting individually during the session; showing a dynamically updated running total cost either on full screen or in a resizable window that can be locked in front of users’ PowerPoint slides; setting automated alerts which sounds when budget limit is hit or at a chosen percentage of the planned total cost; and the ability to issue MS Outlook, iCal or email invitations. The Architect of the Concept and Managing Director of 2MuchTalk Limited, Howard Popeck explained that he had spent years watching businesses let money drop out on wasteful, unfocused or badly managed meetings and even more years advising them on how to address that problem. But now businesses have access to a tool that helps them to overcome this issue. 2MuchTalk fits a niche that is unfilled by any other piece of software. It is distinctly different from simplistic meeting meters and calculators which address only the surface costs but ignore on vital issues such as participant travel time and people arriving and leaving at different times, and do not include meeting review capabilities that can help drive meaningful changes to the meeting process.
Nathesh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Nathesh’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Erin Harrison
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