In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, in-person connection is becoming more important, not less.
We see it across leadership teams. Companies invest more deliberately in offsites, executive sessions, and internal gatherings because when people come together, decisions move faster, alignment becomes clearer, and progress accelerates.
Yet, despite this shared understanding, one question persists: If in-person meetings matter this much, why are they still so difficult to plan?
The answer isn’t a lack of effort. It’s that the cost of planning itself is largely invisible.
This is what I call the meeting tax.
At first glance, meeting planning looks like a logistical equation: aligning schedules, selecting a location, managing travel, and balancing cost. But the real challenge is how all of these elements come together, or more accurately, how they don’t.
Most organizations coordinate complex, multi-stakeholder meetings across a fragmented set of tools. Availability lives in calendars. Travel sits in separate systems. Priorities are discussed in email or Slack. Budgets are tracked in spreadsheets.
What should be a single, connected process is spread across disconnected workflows.
Unlike budget and forecasting, the meeting tax shows up in time, effort, and attention. It’s the hours required to coordinate, the mental fatigue of managing competing constraints, and the lost energy that comes with a fragmented process.
At TROOP, we’ve seen this play out in very real terms. In many cases, planners spend two weeks of manual work just to bring five people together. That effort isn’t spent on strategy. It’s lost searching for the right location, comparing flight options, coordinating availability, managing vendors, and navigating back-and-forth with attendees.
As companies scale, the meeting tax grows. But the problem isn’t the meeting. The problem is that there is no system designed to support how they are planned.
If you look at any modern organization today, every critical function operates within a system. Sales, finance, and engineering rely on structured workflows and tools that bring consistency, visibility, and scalability.
Meeting planning has largely been left behind.
There isn’t one core system where the intent, the logistics, and the outcomes of a meeting come together. Instead, every meeting is rebuilt from scratch from emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools.
A process that starts from scratch cannot scale.
As the number of in-person meetings increases, so does the burden. More coordination, more friction, and more pressure to get every detail right.
When meetings are supported by a system, their nature begins to change. They stop being a logistical problem to solve and become an opportunity to design.
Instead of spending time coordinating inputs, planners can focus on outcomes: bringing the right people together, in the right place, under the right conditions.
This is the shift TROOP is built to support. By bringing structure to how meetings are planned, organizations can move from fragmented workflows to a connected, repeatable, process.
As work becomes more digital and AI becomes more embedded in how organizations operate, in-person meetings will become more intentional. They will no longer be used for routine updates or coordination. Instead, they will be reserved for what cannot be replicated elsewhere: connection, creativity, culture, and trust.
The value of a meeting is no longer defined by the fact that it happens, but by what it enables once people are in the room.
Organizations that recognize this will not just invest in more meetings. They will invest in a better way to bring people together.