The Value of Meetings:
Measuring the ROI of Meetings in Your Organisation

I was pretty good at Maths at school, but I just can’t seem to make head or tail of these numbers. There seems to be a $ 3 Million loss occurring in most businesses, and this cost 'hole' does not show up on any Annual P & L.

What is the cost in question? It is the unrealised return from the $ 6 million dollars invested in meetings each year (for a 1000 person organisation)

Until now no-one has presented a business case for improvement.

Fortunately, 2 areas of low cost investment create immediate improvement in the ROI of business meetings. These will plug your $ 3 million hole and also add significant value through a meeting process that generates consistently high value adding outcomes.

The Missing $ 3 million dollars

First, let's look at the sums.

The costs
The average employee spends 10 to 25% of their working week in meetings. If an average salary is $A 65,000.00, this equates to $A 6.7mil dollars for a 1000 person firm. (see Table 2; Bottom of article)

The return
Whilst the value of meeting outputs is more difficult to measure, compelling survey results indicate that most meetings generate only 50% of their potential value.

A survey of cross function, all level employees from 5 corporate organisations reveal that..
- only 40% deliver clearly agreed decisions that people are committed to implementing.
- half of all meetings fail to harness the best ideas and experience of all participants
- up to 30% of meetings did not require their participation

Of the $ 6.7 Mil dollar investment, a minimum of $ 3 Mil is lost in unfulfilled productivity.

Does this apply to you?
For a quick review of how your meetings are performing, answer the 6 questions from your own experience in Table 1 below.

Why are meetings no longer effective?
So, what is happening in meetings and why are they no longer as effective?
Until now, meetings have been run along traditional lines, because leaders have assumed these approaches are still working.

However, demands on people outside the meeting room have heightened their needs for faster decision making, higher participation, and increased alignment across a wider range of stakeholders.
New skills and methods of running meetings haven't been available to leaders, beyong generic leadership development programs.

And the structure of meetings has remained geared around 'command' and 'control', despite leaders best efforts to facilitate participation. Just picturing the traditional board room table conjures images of a stifled set of corporate dynamics.

Where to Start

Fortunately, there are 2 areas that present opportunities for immediate improvement at low cost.
1. Meetings as a Process - Make it FAST

Planning and conducting meetings as a process rather than an event enables a consistent set of meeting practices to be adopted across an organisation. A meeting process such as FAST guides leaders along more productive paths, and still allows for creativity and variance required in different circumstances

2. Achieving value adding outcomes - Deliver RLA

An effective meeting process delivers higher value outcomes from all meetings. By simultaneously achieving Relationship, Learning and Alignment type outcomes, this results in higher levels of engagement and follow through after meetings.

Let us look at how these 2 opportunities can be immediately applied into your own meeting practices

1. A FAST Meeting process
FAST Meetings is a 4 phase process and set of meeting tools that guides the process of meetings. It harnesses a range of conversation and decision making methods which deliver higher levels of engagement and traction so that meeting outcomes lead to focussed action.

FAST is scalable across different types of meetings, functional areas, projects and hierarchical levels.
FAST is easily learned and used by leaders of meetings so they can quickly enhance learning, alignment and relationship building required to drive more productive outcomes.

FAST Phases
F – Focus ; the purpose, central issue and agreed outcomes to be achieved
A – Awareness ; the knowledge, perceptions and data relating to the issue
S – Solution ; the opportunities, options, and strategies to move forward
T – Traction ; plans for follow through & implementation, evaluation and review

The FAST process guides leaders to get F - focus in their meetings, through framing of the meeting purpose, and the people who are present.

Whilst current meeting practice already includes a Focus phase, this often done regarding the content to be discussed, but not the process to be used. For example, without a process of hearing from all participants early on, the meeting dynamic is established that not everyone will get a turn.

Interactive Focus methods such as Stand Out and Taking Turns inject energy and provide constructive approaches to discussion from the outset.

A - Awareness is then facilitated through the use of interactive conversation methods, such as Business Cafe', Open Space, Dialogue and Art Gallery. These speed up information sharing, and help groups cut through more quickly to key issues and root causes of problems as the Current Reality is comprehensively explored.

The S-Solution phase encourages synthesis into concrete, coherent solutions. Transparent decision making methods such as The Great Wall and Support Cycle help people maximise ownership and consensus, to ensure widespread commitment. Solutions are agreed well before the end of the meeting, so there is time to reflect on the activities required to implement.

Implementation and commitment to action are clarified in the T-Traction phase. Strategies and priorities are clarified in detail using tools such as The Wheel of Commitment, Traction Cafe', and FAST Action. These harness the engagement and traction already developed during the meeting process, ensuring that actions are not only planned, but also road tested across the group and translated into individual commitments.

The FAST Meeting process is not rocket science. It provides a simple process that all meeting participants can follow. This avoids the current situation in most meetings where the process of discussing agenda items is a random flow between these 4 phases without a clear pathway, leading to 'drift', time wasting, disengagement and rushed decision making at the end of meetings.

B. Deliver Value Adding Outcomes with RLA
Face to face meetings are expensive investments relative to other forms of electronic communication such as email and phone. Therefore, meetings must deliver higher value outcomes that can only be achieved through face to face encounters.

Three high value outcomes form the basis of the RLA model. These outcomes include..
Relationships - networking, stakeholder 'buy-in', team work, trust & knowing others better
Learning - knowledge sharing, insight, understanding, awareness & sustainable problem solving
Alignment - decision making, strategies, consensus, priorities & commitment

Currently, many meetings set out to achieve predominantly one of these. For example, some meetings are established as networking events. Others such as project updates may have a learning orientation whilst many that are geared toward decision making are alignment oriented.

However, this one dimensional focus achieves only partial delivery with the other 2 outcomes. For example, in the pursuit of decision making, many meetings are not effective in building relationships, nor do they often maximise the learning and insight that occurs prior to decisions being made.

Productive meetings using effective process consistently deliver RLA outcomes simultaneously. These enable alignment to emerge as a result of effective decision making, whilst also facilitating relationship building and generating valuable learning.

The end result of RLA outcomes are higher levels of engagement, ownership and follow through of meetings. Consequently, meetings are able to deliver more value. The increased effectiveness moves beyond the boundaries of the meeting room to positively impact the broader business performance.

Plug the $3 Million Cost Hole
By developing the process of meetings and staying focussed on higher value outcomes, meeting productivity can be quickly improved. This will increase the 'strike rate' of good meetings, and turn a $ 3 Million cost hole into a significant surplus, through the increased value generated.

______________________________

by David Pointon - FAST Meetings

FAST Meetings provides 3 levels of service to support improved effectiveness, and implementation of Process Improvements; ranging from Meeting by Design to transferring skills to your leaders through FAST Facilitation DIY

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