Productive meetings: what is the ROI of your meeting? (1)

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The platform for meeting leadership
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A blog post from Leadmeetings
Productive meetings ROI?
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Productive meetings what is the ROI of your
meeting?
Meetings do cost money. Definitely. And you can
find numerous tools that help you calculate the
costs of your meetings. Just google for
downloadable apps. But what do these numbers
really say? It only tells you how much money you
invested in the meeting. Can you tell whether you
are having productive meetings? Do you really
know the value of your meetings? Telling the
Return on Investment or ROI of your meeting is
not that easy! The whole question of ROI of
meetings popped up at a workshop I was giving
with Co-learning in Belgium. Discussing about
leadership, meeting design, tools and methods we
started wondering what the ROI of meetings was
and how to calculate is.
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Meetings are just a means
Meetings are just a way of realizing your
objectives. So the ROI of your meeting should
really be calculated compared to other
alternatives. And yes, there are alternatives to
meetings as meetings are just a means (see my
blogpost here). All meeting objectives could be
achieved without a meeting. And thats where
assessing productive meetings becomes
complicated. Because we usually do not try the
alternatives and even less do we calculate what
these alternatives would cost us compared to our
usual meetings. When it comes to assessing the
ROI of your meeting, we currently have no more
than our gut feeling.
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ROI of your meeting 3 things you should look at
for productive meetings

• I suggest three things you could be looking at
  that will give you a first idea of the ROI of
  your meetings
• Growth of your organisation as a result of your
  meeting structure
• Accountable actions that come from your meetings
• Behaviour change that resulted from your meetings

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ad a. Growth through your meeting structure
Some meeting structures are better fit to enhance
and sustain the growth of your organisation than
others. Basically, some structures yield more
productive meetings. So the question is what
meeting structure (and by that I mean the type of
meetings, their frequency and their length)
should you adopt? If you meet every week sitting
around the table for 2 hours because you feel
that everyone should be updated, then consider a
daily standup meeting for not more 15 minutes. A
longer monthly meeting solves deeper problems.
And what about strategic issues? Try longer
meetings with a frequency of 2-3 per year. Moving
towards 21st Century Meetings would require you
to consider an even bigger overhaul. So basically
review your meeting structure. Ask yourself why
you meet and try to design the best meeting
structure fitting your needs. Be aware that this
is a trial and error path. The structure will not
be correct right from the start. And youll have
to revue your meeting structure every once in a
while as your environment will change, the
organisation will grow and people get bored doing
the same stuff after a while.
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ad b. Accountable actions from your meetings
The proof of the pudding of a meeting lies not in
the meeting itself, but in the actions that
follow the meeting. To put it differently
productive meetings depend on the actions being
followed-up afterwards. So get the actions clear
if you want to be able to say something on the
ROI of your meeting. Make this happen already
within the meeting itself. Draft the actions with
all participants. Do so by writing them down on a
flip-chart or on a screen so all participants are
able to see, read and amend all the actions. Thus
they are able to react immediately if an action
is not being put precisely enough. Never forget
to add the holder of the action (basically making
your action SMART). This also increases the
engagement within the meeting and with the
actions. Too often I still see secretaries
struggling after the meeting to pen the actions
down in the minutes. And because they are
struggling, the minutes are being sent around way
too late to be able to keep the momentum. That is
definitely not how productive meetings should
look like. Then after the meeting, send them
quickly to the participants so theyll be able to
act swiftly. A suggestion could be to publish
them on a central place where everyone can see
theirs and others progress. The ROI of your
meeting is a result of how many actions have been
identified and how much have been implemented
successfully.
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ad c. Behaviour change from your meetings
If your meetings clearly enhance the way people
work together, then youre on the right track. As
a result of your meetings, participants change
their behaviour and start cooperating, sharing,
helping one and other more than they did before.
Now, in order to know the ROI of your meetings
you should start measuring the behaviour of the
participants. This sounds difficult and is
definitely something you should plan carefully
before your meetings, but once the system is in
place its a great tool. These things all give
you an insight on the ROI of your meeting. Once
you get a clear picture you can start a
continuous improvement programme of your
meetings. And using alternatives to meetings
should definitely be on the agenda. So, when are
you going to start to get an idea of the ROI of
your meeting? PS I havent touched upon the
important topic of leadership of meetings in this
post (i.e. how the meeting itself is run). This
definitely impacts on the ROI of your meeting.
Check my post on this issue.
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Contact info

• Phone [phone]
• Email info_at_rubenvanderlaan.com
• Website https//leadmeetings.com/
• Twitter _at_rubenvanderlaan
• LinkedIn Ruben van der Laan
• To join the free webinar visit
  https//leadmeetings.com/webinar/
• For further reads, please visit
  https//leadmeetings.com/blog/

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Thank You