I was talking to a client recently who had been given the job of looking at how they could improve their meetings. Meetings are where most collaboration happens, and meetings also drive a lot of travel and they are where decision-making happens. If we can get our meetings to work then we have an impact on all of these three important areas.<\/p>\n
I put together a sample business case for the project.<\/p>\n
Put this together and you have a cost of around \u20ac300M per year<\/strong>, just for the unnecessary<\/strong> meetings. Now I don\u2019t believe you can eliminate all of this but half would be a good target, so let\u2019s aim in our business case for savings of \u20ac150 million per year.<\/p>\n This is a significant business project and definitely worth doing something about. How would we treat a project like this in other areas of the business?<\/p>\n The businesses I worked for in my corporate career tended to be looking for an internal rate of return of 40%, another way of putting this is a payback in 2 \u00bd years.<\/p>\n So it seems in these areas we would have been happy to spend \u20ac375M to deliver this.<\/p>\n Can you imagine your business investing the \u20ac375 million in improving your meetings? Me neither! But why not?<\/p>\n Is it that we don\u2019t believe that the savings can be delivered? As someone who has worked in business planning and in manufacturing I can tell you that the ROI assumptions we make on capital and market investments are often guesses. Marketing investments in particular are often made on educated guesses about customer acceptance or market needs that are often beyond our control rather than internal spend such as meetings where we can at least control our own destiny.<\/p>\n Most internal cost saving projects are justified to some extent on labor cost savings because people are expensive.<\/p>\n Quite often when we have conversations with clients they are looking for a training course or some materials that they can send people to help them run better meetings. In many cases this approach has been tried in the past but hasn\u2019t worked.<\/p>\n Our approach can of course incorporate training and guidelines, but if you ask most managers they already know<\/strong> how to run the perfect meeting, it\u2019s just that they never do <\/strong>and they never attend one that is perfect. It\u2019s not a lack of knowledge; it\u2019s a lack of application of good practice consistently over time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also tempting to jump straight to improving the facilitation of the meetings without asking what meetings and topics should be eliminated and what participants don\u2019t need to be involved. Our research shows that around 41% of meeting content is unnecessary and that 19% of participants shouldn\u2019t be there – and it\u2019s very easy to identify which is which.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also important to deal with some of the underlying corporate cultural issues. If your culture equates status with being invited to meetings, thinks everything needs to be done face-to-face and stresses the importance of networks but doesn\u2019t give other opportunities to build them outside meetings – then it is going to be hard to stop meetings unless you put alternative mechanisms in place to satisfy these needs.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s forget our unrealistic \u20ac375M budget to do with this and pitch for just \u20ac50M.<\/p>\n If you could deliver \u20ac150 million of savings per year for only \u20ac50 million in upfront cost wouldn\u2019t you be a business hero? Wouldn\u2019t that be the best investment your company made this decade? Payback in four months!<\/p>\n Think about the scope of project this would enable.<\/p>\n You would probably still be struggling to spend \u20ac5 million. You could spend some of the surplus celebrating your success.<\/p>\n So why have I kept going on about big budgets?<\/p>\n So if you have a project to reduce the volume and improve the quality of your meetings do the business case first. You won\u2019t make a change in this pervasive challenge just by running a few training courses. If you can build understanding amongst your stakeholders of the scope of the change and invest accordingly then you have a real chance of delivering significant savings to the business.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d like to find out more about how you can really change your meetings culture, give us a call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was talking to a client recently who had been given the job of looking at how they could improve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":21185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","type-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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