Foster Success with Better Meetings. A unique look at meeting ROI.

Imagine you’re on a sales team for a reputable company. You arrive at the annual meeting, all dressed up with suitcase in hand, only to find yourself at the most drab hotel imaginable on the outskirts of town. The chairs are unconformable, the coffee is cold and as the regional manager speaks on the newest improvements to the sales funnel into a squawking PA system operated by the janitor, all you can think about is the stale smell wafting off the walls. Do you feel excited and invigorated for the upcoming quarter? Do you feel supported and appreciated?

Contrast that to arriving at a five star hotel where all of your needs are met professionally with a smile. The environment is beautifully designed, the refreshments are actually refreshing and the audio/video presentation goes off without a hitch. You know your company spent a lot to bring you here and you feel supported and appreciated. While you’re engaged in the meeting and learning a lot about this year’s initiatives, you also feel like you’re on a little vacation. When you get back to the office, you feel excited and invigorated. You are ready to get to work and be productive.

In the first situation, the potential success of the meeting took a back seat to the environment of the meeting. The desired outcome of informing and exciting the sales staff was not meet because the meeting planner focused on the hard costs of the meeting and not the desired outcomes or the meeting’s objectives.

People with this view are more apt to search out the cheapest meeting solutions, sometimes even cobbling together a gamut of free providers to come up with a complex and often frustrating meeting solution. They are also likely to book rooms at cheap conference centers that overlook hospitality. At face value this looks as it should leads to better ROI.

Spending less is always better, right? Nope.

By focusing on the cost of the meeting product, these hard cost calculators forget the fact that meetings aren’t about the product or venue. Meetings are about bringing people together to achieve a specific objective. To get a better picture of how much money we actually put towards achieving objectives through the meeting of minds, let’s add the cost of people to the meeting ROI equation.

The cost of people in terms of salary can be high.

For example, if you have weekly one-hour meetings with 5 people who have an average annual salary of $60,000, your meeting cost per year in people time is $8,667. Add to that hard costs and you’ll see how big of an investment your weekly meetings really are.

But that’s ok.

Companies invest a lot in meetings because, potentially, meetings can achieve so much more than that dollar amount. The fact is, the true value of your people can’t be measured on employment costs alone. People are worth more than their salary. The true value of their time comes from what they produce in that time and the impact they make on your business after the meeting has concluded. When you incorporate what your people can produce into the meeting ROI equation, the benefits well outweigh the costs…That is, if your meetings aren’t a waste of time.

Settle for cheap meeting products and you settle for cheap outputs.

If you’re having meetings with real objectives that have an impact on your business and you’re investing your money and your team’s time in those objectives, you don’t want to squander it by evaluating meeting products on price alone. You want to make your solution decisions with productivity and desired outcomes in mind. You want to create a meeting environment that will foster ideas with the technologies that can bring out the best in your team.

For virtual meetings, that means considering all available technologies and how they can help you achieve your desired outcome. In order to do this effectively you’ll need a reliable service with easy access, host controls and quality audio – at the very least. Depending on your objectives, you may need the ability to record and edit, share screens and media files, have customized layouts, connect internationally, ect. This type of customization and adaptability can’t be done with a free service and without the functions your objective needs, you waste your investment.

For off-site meetings, it means finding a venue that provides a professional and well run environment so your objectives can be met is important. It means using a service, like Teamings, that not only helps you find the best venues at the best prices (free of charge), but also offers meeting planning assistance with logistics, allowing you the time and energy to focus on the content of your meeting.

So the next time you look at your meeting ROI, think about what your meeting is really costing you and how it can really benefit you. A meeting’s potential lays in its ability to meet a worthwhile objective. A worthwhile objective is worth more than the cost of a meeting. You’ve already invested time and talent into a meeting, you should make sure the meeting environment fosters that potential.

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(Photo credit lendingmemo.com)