There are costs associated with each meeting, both direct and indirect. As a business, there must be an expected return on investment of those costs, and the return should be substantially greater than the amount that the company is paying to hold the meeting in the first place.
If someone came to you and asked for an authorization to spend several hundred dollars on a piece of machinery or a project, you would want to know exactly what value you would receive and how the company would benefit.
When you convene a meeting, you have to recognize that the cost of the people in that meeting can be enormous. A simple way to determine the cost is to multiply the hourly income of the participants by the number of hours of the meeting. If these people are earning $50,000 to $100,000 per year, that works out to $25 to $50 per hour for each participant. If you invite ten of these highly paid people to a meeting, it can cost the company up to $500, or more, for a single hour. Imagine paying that to each person out of your own pocket.
Continually ask yourself if the expense of this meeting is justified. What will be the return on investment if the meeting is successful and productive? Is it worth spending this money? If you are taking people away from other productive work, the meeting has to be more productive and valuable than the activities they would otherwise be accomplishing.
Identify the things that you can do before and during the meeting to make sure that the return on investment is at its maximum. Your job as the meeting planner and organizer is to increase the value of the meeting so that when people adjourn they say, “That was a really good meeting. This was a valuable use of time.”
One of my favorite time management laws is called the Law of the Excluded Alternative. It simply says that choosing to do one thing means simultaneously choosing not to do all other things you could be doing at the same time.
Since you can only do one thing at a time, whenever you choose something to do, such as participating in a meeting, you are choosing not to do everything and anything else that may be of greater value. What you are seeking is the highest ROTI—return on time invested. Think about your time, and the time of every other person, as if you were paying people in cash at their hourly rate for the time that they spend in the meeting.