Economics Today 18th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

تمرين 1

Frustrated by the Opportunity Cost of Time Spent in Meetings
Management studies have shown that the typical office worker spends just under eight hours per day at an employer's office but actually devotes less than half of that time to assigned work. Workers usually spend more than an hour each day reading and sending e-mails. The most significant allocations of their time, however, are face-to-face meetings with co-workers. The average office worker spends more than three hours per week in such meetings.
When Paul Betts was working as a software developer at Microsoft, he calculated that the typical meeting had an opportunity cost, measured in the wages that the company was paying employees to meet instead of work, of about $500. In frustration, he left that job to take a position at GitHub, which produces software apps that work teams can utilize to collaborate on projects remotely using digital devices. The apps produced by Betts and his colleagues also enable a company's employees to engage in discussions in online chat rooms as they work on their shared project, which largely eliminates e-mail communications as well.
Betts is happier at work, because he hardly e-mails or has any faceto- face meetings with co-workers during the working day. Furthermore, the products that he develops enable other companies to avoid incurring substantial opportunity costs associated with time that employees otherwise would devote to e-mailing or meeting.
Why do you think that some firms now require workers to stand during meetings?