What Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank could spend on meetings in a year

No annual report has a line called meetings. What large listed companies do publish, every year and in detail, is how many people they employ and what those people cost. Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank are two of the largest employers in Germany, one industrial and one financial, and both publish these figures for 2024. That is enough to put a price on a working hour at each of them. It is not enough to know how many of those hours are spent in meetings, and this article does not pretend otherwise.

So instead of one number, you get three. Each scenario takes a share of working time that could plausibly go to meetings and applies it to the personnel budget the company itself reported. The low scenario is deliberately modest and the high one deliberately generous. The result is a range, with the arithmetic shown at every step, so you can check it, disagree with an assumption and put in your own.

Four figures carry the whole article. Each comes from the company's own reporting for the 2024 financial year.

Volkswagen's annual report gives an average workforce of 682,724 for 2024, up 0.6 % on the year before. That count includes the employees of the Chinese joint ventures. The notes to the consolidated financial statements give personnel expenses of €49.786 billion for the same year, the order of magnitude Handelsblatt also reported in its balance-sheet check. Personnel expenses in the accounts include the employer's social security and pension costs as well as wages and salaries, so the figure is already fully loaded in the sense the calculator uses.

One thing follows from that, and it is why this article never divides the one figure by the other. The Chinese joint ventures are not fully consolidated, so their wage bills do not sit in the group's personnel expenses, while their people do sit in the headcount. Dividing €49.786 billion by 682,724 would mix two different populations and understate the cost of a head. The scenarios below do not need a per-head figure for Volkswagen at all. They work on the personnel budget directly, and the headcount only tells you the scale.

Deutsche Bank reported 89,753 employees at 31 December 2024 in its full-year results and its Annual Report 2024 on Form 20-F, counted as full-time equivalents, so two half-time colleagues count as one. Its Compensation Report 2024 gives total compensation awarded for the year of €11.056 billion. Fixed pay of €8.1 billion is the largest part of it, and year-end variable compensation of €2.5 billion the next largest.

Two details matter for what follows. Compensation awarded for a year is a different figure from the compensation and benefits expense in the income statement, because part of the variable pay is deferred and expensed over later years. And the report's definition decides which employer costs are in it. If some employer contributions sit outside the €11.056 billion, the bank's scenarios below are on the low side. The headcount is a year-end figure, while the pay covers the whole year, so a per-person figure built from the two is an approximation.

With that said, the approximation is useful. €11.056 billion over 89,753 full-time equivalents is about €123,000 per position a year. Spread over the calculator's 2,080-hour working year, that is about €59 an hour.

The usual way to price a meeting is attendees times hourly rate times duration. That needs data about meetings: how many people sit in them, for how long, how often. Neither company publishes any of it. What they do publish is the whole personnel budget for the year, and that is enough for a simpler question: if a given share of all paid working time went to meetings, what share of the personnel budget would that be?

This is the calculator's own formula, rearranged. The calculator's company mode multiplies employees by an hourly rate (salary divided by 2,080) by hours of meetings a week by 52 weeks. Since 52 weeks of 40 hours is 2,080 hours, the 52 and the 2,080 reduce to hours a week over 40. Employees times salary is the personnel budget. What is left is the formula above. Entering one company's published figures into the calculator therefore gives the same answer as this article, and the section on the calculator below shows how.

The method has three properties worth knowing. It needs no assumed salary band, because the company's own total replaces it. It needs no overhead surcharge, because a published personnel expense already contains the employer's costs. And it is linear: double the share and the cost doubles, which is why the results table below can be checked with a pocket calculator.

It also has a weakness, and it is the same weakness any outside estimate has. It treats every euro of personnel cost as if it bought the same kind of hour. A production shift, a branch counter and a strategy team are paid from the same budget and spend their weeks very differently. Applying one share to all of them is a simplification, and the scenarios are built to show how much the answer moves when the share changes.

The one number nobody outside these companies has is the share of working time that goes to meetings. So the article uses three, each with a stated origin.

The scenarios are defined as shares of working time, and the hours are only a translation. Many collectively agreed weeks in Germany are shorter than 40 hours; the metal and electrical industry has long worked to a 35-hour week in large parts of the country. At 35 hours, the same three shares are about 4.4, 8.75 and 15.75 hours of meetings a week. The euro amounts do not change, because they depend on the share, not on the length of the week.

For Volkswagen: €49.786 billion × 0.125 = €6.223 billion; × 0.25 = €12.447 billion; × 0.45 = €22.404 billion. For Deutsche Bank: €11.056 billion × 0.125 = €1.382 billion; × 0.25 = €2.764 billion; × 0.45 = €4.975 billion. Nothing else goes into these figures.

A more useful way to read the range is per hour of the week. At a 40-hour week, one hour of meetings a week per person is 2.5 % of working time. At Volkswagen that is about €1.24 billion a year, at Deutsche Bank about €276 million. Every hour a week added to or taken off the average moves the total by that amount. At a 35-hour week the hour is a larger share, and the amounts rise to about €1.42 billion and €316 million.

The calculator also reports meeting time as full-time positions: all the hours spent in meetings, divided by one person's working year. For Deutsche Bank, where the headcount and the pay cover the same group of people, that is simply the headcount times the share. At 12.5 % it is about 11,200 full-time equivalents, at 25 % about 22,400 and at 45 % about 40,400.

For Volkswagen, the same multiplication on the reported workforce gives about 85,000, 171,000 and 307,000. Those numbers are here for scale only, because the headcount includes the Chinese joint ventures and the euro figures above do not.

What the figures do show is scale. At companies of this size, the share of working time spent in meetings is a quantity measured in billions of euros, and a change of one hour a week in the average is worth hundreds of millions. That is true whatever the real share at either company turns out to be.

The meeting cost calculator has three modes. Company prices a year of meetings for the whole organisation. Simulator prices one meeting before you book it. Live counts the cost up while a meeting runs, in the browser tab's title as well. The method in this article is the company mode.

Company mode asks for four things: the number of employees, an average annual salary, the region, and hours of meetings a week per person. It opens at 100 employees, a salary of €65,000 and 10 hours. The hours can be set from 1 to 30, with presets at 4, 8, 12 and 20. A switch adds a standard overhead to the salary for employer costs: 20 % in Europe and 35 % in the United States. The results are the yearly cost, with the monthly and weekly figures under it, and the time in meetings expressed as full-time employees.

Volkswagen does not fit into the calculator in one piece: the employee field stops at 99,999. Because the method is linear, you can run a slice and scale it. At 10 hours, €49.786 billion is €12.447 billion, and a hundredth of the budget gives a hundredth of the answer.

For your own company the inputs are easier to find than for a listed group, and better. You know your headcount and salary bands. You can use a department instead of the whole organisation. And you can replace our three shares with a number from your own calendars: the hours a typical person in that team spends in meetings in a normal week. The calculator's help text gives an example: a daily 15-minute standup plus one two-hour planning session is about 3.25 hours.

If you know your fully loaded cost per person, enter it as the salary and switch the overhead off, as with Deutsche Bank above. If you only know gross salaries, leave the switch on. The standard formula behind the per-meeting modes, with worked examples, is in How to calculate the cost of a meeting.

The formula has one lever that matters more than the others: every person in a meeting pays for the whole of it. A one-hour update with twenty people in it is twenty hours of paid time, whether each person needed five minutes of it or fifty.

Capme changes that for one kind of meeting: the recurring one where people take turns to report. The organiser writes an agenda with a topic, an owner and a time budget for each item, and a deadline. Each owner gets one email, records their topic in the browser in one take and sends it. When the videos are in, the organiser publishes the recorded agenda, and everyone watches it, chapter by chapter, when it suits them. The organiser sees who has watched, who has watched part of it and who has not opened it yet. If the workspace is set to totals only, they see how many have.

Take a weekly one-hour update with twenty people in it, five of whom present a topic. Live, it costs twenty person-hours a week. Now record it. Say each of the five topics runs four minutes, so the agenda is twenty minutes of video. Say each owner needs fifteen minutes to record, retakes included: that is 1.25 hours. All twenty people watch the twenty minutes: that is 6.7 hours. Together it comes to about 7.9 person-hours instead of 20.

Every number in that example is an assumption, and yours will differ. The four minutes a topic, the fifteen minutes to record and the idea that everybody watches everything are ours. What does not change is where the difference comes from: time that only one person needs is no longer multiplied by everyone in the room. The workspace's Insights page makes the same estimate from assumptions you set yourself (hourly rate, typical participants, how much longer the live version would take) and labels it as an estimate.

Not every meeting belongs on a recorded agenda. Status updates, announcements and training, where one person speaks and many listen, fit it well. A decision with disagreement in it, a difficult conversation or a first meeting with somebody should stay live.

On price, the people who record pay and the people who only watch do not. Team is billed per speaker, from three speakers, and every paid plan is sold to businesses; the details are on the pricing page. A trial runs 14 days with every speaker included and no card.