Aspiring executives can show off these days using their grooming, clothes sense and body consciousness, by name-dropping, by disclosing their lifestyles, gym memberships and holiday destinations, or by polishing and valeting their added-spec car.   Alternatively they can win kudos by organising or influencing business get-togethers where Return on Investment counts for just as much as the Holy Grail mattered to the Knights Templar.

But a buzz-word five years ago, ROI has now become the magic bullet that cures every known meetings malaise, justifies all-known conference costs and effectively eliminates all forms of fuzzy thinking amongst event planners.  This all-pervading quest for group productivity inevitably has engendered courses, seminars, websites, academic analysis, boardroom intervention and even the founding of an official body (hopefully delivering its own ROI!).  Soon, no doubt, we will look forward to ‘National Return on ROI Week’,  and can a degree course in ROI be far behind?  And who would doubt the likelihood of the concept of Return on Meetings Sustainability?

staff morale

Mild sarcasm aside, there is obviously a cast-iron case to set the conference budget (including delegate salaries and travelling costs?) against anticipated and realised performance, whether assessed by incremental sales, higher staff morale, reduced absenteeism, successful attitude-change or more targeted objectives such as the measurable result of a product launch, or outwitting a new competitor in the marketplace, or simply the retention of VIP clients.

To be assessed over a realistic period of time, it therefore follows that every ROI monitoring device possible ought to be deployed, from delegate questionnaires and participant focus groups, to accurately assessed deliverables such as a better bottom line, a hike in market share, and year-on-year improvements generally.  This is all good news, and especially so now that public sector events also are coming under similarly robust scrutiny.  At least we are getting away from tick boxes checking whether attendees enjoyed lunch, found their bedrooms clean, and liked the speakers.  Instead, the operative words are now objectives, targets, performance criteria, and time frames. 

The European Event ROI Institute helpfully structures the processes that affect meetings as: checking participant satisfaction and subsequent intentions … assessing learned outcomes … tracking what the delegates actually then did … and summing all this up in terms of a financial contribution for the organisation concerned.

delegates under-perform

So far, so euphoric.  Disciplines like social psychology, workplace behaviour, opinion research, and personality trait analysis etc. each can enrich the processes associated with group dynamics.  Nor will it be long before the quest for ROI recognises that delegates under-perform when they have slept badly, drunk too much, eaten the wrong foods (excess fats), are out of synch with their normal circadian rhythms or are simply on edge because they are shy, nervous, missing a partner (or dog), or dislike colleagues or bosses (and therefore ought not to have been there in the first place).   Strict, tee-total, hard-slog get-togethers increasingly have their place, ending forever the notion of the conference as a ‘jolly’.

But this thinkpiece has another purpose, namely to speculate on how the Return on Investment ethos might one day soon be taken further.  Ten nuanced suggestions follow:

• Return on Lateral Thinking … evaluating meetings-generated ideas for cost-savings and profit-boosting.   INSIGHTS

• Return on Synergy … assessing how collectively those involved achieved more/expect to achieve more than they would have done
  as individuals.  BONDING

• Return on Wisdom … working out how much the event benefited from the thoughts and perspectives of the ‘grey hairs’ who participated.   EXPERIENCE

• Return on Networking … focusing afterwards on the new collaborations and shared decisions that arose during the event.  RELATIONSHIPS

• Return on Virtuality … infiltrating the meeting with electronic contributions, ranging from video-d or hologram speakers, to voting keypads and on-message graphic presentations.  CONNECTIVITY.
• Return on Leadership … scrutinising the chairperson for his/her success in maximising meetings productivity.  PERFORMANCE.
• Return on Personality Traits … judging how varying delegate types were synchronised to greater effect.  COLLECTIVITY.
• Return on Outreach … deploying webcams, scrolling twitter, intranet links, text updates etc. to engage a much wider corporate audience than just those attending.  INVOLVEMENT.
• Return on Time/Opportunity … whilst acknowledging that the days spent at conferences have a time/opportunity cost (what else might have been achieved remaining in the office?) but equally evaluating what extra advantageous dimensions to the business emerged during the event. UNPREDICTABILITY.
• Return on Passion … identifying that the sub-text of a meeting is to raise participant morale, and placing a value on the benefits that derive subsequently from the extra personal esteem, corporate pride, brand identification etc.  CHARISMA.

To sum up.  The ‘Meetings Police’ are out to get you if your get-together isn’t a huge and measurable success, but fortunately there is plenty of scope to demonstrate the disproportionate advantages arising from face-to-face contact and chemistry during meetings...

Please send new releases to: charlotte@latemeetings.com