What’s Your Meeting’s ROI?

Andrea Brockmeier is the Director of Project Management at Watermark Learning. She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training.

  Stakeholder Management   Strategy   ProjectsAtWork  

Being a good steward of organizational resources includes making sure that the time spent in meetings is worthwhile to all attendees. Defining your meeting’s purpose and desired outcome will go a long way toward improving its return on the investment.

I fired up my online calendar and started to schedule a meeting with my manager. Our meetings are typically less than 30 minutes, but I had a lot to talk about, so I was going to make it an hour. Yessirree. I had a lot of stuff on my mind, I needed an audience, and he was the logical person to hear me out!

We have a meeting protocol in our organization: you can’t schedule a meeting without identifying the objective of the meeting and the desired outcome. At first, I didn’t think it would be difficult to get my thoughts around those requirements and document them. But when it came to actually spell out the objective in the invitation, my fingers froze. I hadn’t gotten much past “To talk about all the stuff I need to talk about.” That, of course, left me with nothing to describe in the way of desired outcome. 

So I took my hands off the keyboard, put them on my forehead and started to think:  What is the purpose of this meeting? Why should he take his time — that is, the organization’s most valuable resource — to meet with …

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