Understanding the ROI of your Meetings
The low hanging fruit that can boost your business productivity

Have you ever been frustrated sitting in a meeting that’s going nowhere and achieving nothing?

Well you’re not alone. Negative meeting experiences are amongst the most common complaints of corporate leaders regardless of their role, or the size and type of their business.

Meetings are the blight of corporate life. But they’re also their lifeblood.

At a time when people are being asked to achieve more with less, improving the return you get from meetings is 'low hanging fruit' that can have a major impact on your business productivity and bottom line.

Let's help you understand Meeting ROI (Return on Investment) so you can construct a business case for better meetings

Determining Meeting ROI for Your Business

Step 1: Knowing the costs of meetings

As a starting point, you need to know exactly how much your meetings are costing your business.

By far the greatest cost of meetings is staff time and a simple formula can help you work out the costs.

Calculating the costs of In-House meetings

A formula for determining salary costs is as follows. Multiply the average hours per week your staff spend in meetings with their average salaried hour.

For greater accuracy, it is important to discern between front line staff who have a lower per hour salary and typically spend relatively little time in meetings per week, and senior managers who have a higher per hour value and can spend between 8 and 24 hrs on average per week in meetings.

You can quickly calculate the costs of your meetings using our Meeting ROI Calculator

The formula reveals that on average it costs $2,500 per year for a front line employee to attend internal meetings and a whopping $30,000 per Senior Manager. This means that for every 100 staff, over $ 600,000 a year is spent in meetings. This is a big investment and warrants a sizeable return.

Step 2: Determining the return from Meetings

To determine Meeting ROI, you also need to understand and measure the outcomes or return meetings provide.

Meeting outcomes are often considered intangible and the diversity of meetings can make measurement appear complex. This could explain why so few business leaders have calculated Meeting ROI until now.

However, it is possible to create modelling assumptions that reflect complex systems in simple numbers. For example, GDP is accepted as a single indicator of National output, and Staff Satisfaction scores are succinct indicators of employee’s feelings and attitudes.

Similarly, a model of meeting outcomes we developed in 2004 and validated in over 40 organisations over the past 5 years provides a single score of meeting value. When this model was researched with over 2,500 people it showed that most meetings achieve less than 50% of their potential outcomes. Weighing that against the $600,000 investment mentioned above, this means ineffective meetings are delivering a negative return of $300,000 per 100 staff each year.

Measuring the Value of Meeting Outcomes

FAST Meeting Co.'s model of high value meeting outcomes considers 4 categories of outcome:

Traction: Commitment and follow through of actions & accountabilities

Relationship: Trust building and understanding through open, honest dialogue

Learning: Strategic insights created through sharing of data, knowledge and experience

Alignment: Sustainable decision making that people are committed to

Each of these outcomes can be scored and the total compared against the investment. A weighting for Traction is used as this is a more significant driver of ultimate value to a business.

The Meeting ROI Calculator enables you to measure your meeting outcomes.

Increasing Your Meeting ROI

Once you have measured your costs and returns from meetings, the question arises; “How can you improve Meeting ROI in your business?”

There are 2 ways to do this.

Firstly you can increase the return from each meeting through meeting culture and process improvement.

Simple process improvements can be implemented that consistently increase the return achieved and change the ‘meeting culture’. Measurable gains can be tracked through an annual or 6 monthly measurement using the Meeting ROI Calculator.

Secondly you can reduce the frequency and length of meetings through clearer meeting purpose and ‘rhythm’.

Sharpening the focus on the purpose and ‘rhythm of meetings’ can quickly reduce total meeting time, freeing up staff resource for more productive activities. For every 100 staff, the accumulated effect is the same as adding 2 Full time employees at no cost.

Conclusion

It is now possible for you to measure Meeting ROI by using common sense and proven methods. This gives you the ammunition you may need to establish a business case and create the impetus for action.

The end result is a productive meeting culture, ensuring that your time and energy and that of your colleagues is spent only in engaging, relevant and productive meetings that deliver value and add to your bottom line.

Next Steps

For a more comprehensive examination of the business case and measurement of ROI look out for the release of our White Paper on “ROI of Meetings"
To calculate the Meeting ROI for your business, use the Meeting ROI Calculator
For solutions on improving the return from each meeting or reducing the time spent in meetings;
- Call FAST Meetings Co. on 61 2 95 022 022
- Obtain further articles, podcasts and tools on our website; http://www.fastmeetings.com.au/

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by David Pointon - FAST Meetings Co.

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FAST Meetings Co. provides Coaching, Training and Tools to support improved ROI of meetings in businesses, Government and Not for Profit organisations.

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