If you're looking to help improve your company's bottom line, there's an area you may need to give more attention to: Meetings.

There are two primary reasons why meetings can have such a big bottom line impact. First, according to the annual Meetings Market Report, we spend billions of dollars on them annually. The second reason why meetings are so important is that they provide an incredible opportunity to effect change and harness intellectual capital.

If meetings are such a great area of opportunity, then why haven't we done a better job of exploiting them? One of the major reasons is that meetings, especially large ones, are not designed to deliver strategic value. They are designed to entertain more than to improve ROI.

Responsibility, Size, Philosophy, and Approaches

To ensure a better ROM (return on meetings) there are four areas that need to be addressed: responsibility, size, philosophy, and approaches.

Responsibility: Who has responsibility for meetings? Regardless of size, there is usually a business leader who is sponsoring a meeting. However, most business leaders believe that for small meetings, they can simply do things the way they've always done them. They aren't aware of the strategic impact a meeting can have when it's carefully designed to deliver on core business objectives. For larger meetings, leaders think they can provide a few basic ideas and guidelines to a meeting planner and then allow them to make the meeting happen. This approach is sufficient if the objective is simply to entertain. However, if a business leader wants a large meeting to have a strategic impact, then they need to engage with a range of people in the organization. Meetings with high impact will often require input from communicators, IT, HR/OD, key business functions, or other departments.

Communication professionals can play a key role in making meetings strategic by coordinating efforts across these areas. In communication departments that have a role such as "relationship manager," this effort is easily accomplished. The communications relationship manager meets with the business executive to discuss key business objectives. The meeting objectives are then derived from those business objectives. The relationship manager can then coordinate efforts across disciplines as the design for the meeting develops to meet the objectives. Such an approach requires that relationship managers familiarize themselves with a broad range of change management and meeting tools and approaches. That way, they will know what to recommend and where to go to get specific expertise when it is needed.

Size and Type: Different sizes of meetings call for different approaches. Certainly large meetings usually have bigger budgets and offer significant change management opportunities. However, in any significant change management effort, meetings of all sizes can serve as key leverage points for change. Communications professionals would do well to either develop either in-house or external expertise on how to design and execute meetings of all sizes. While many communicators work with meeting production companies for large meetings, very few have an understanding of how many options are available for designing a range of meeting sizes.

Communicators also need to develop expertise in virtual meetings, a type of meeting that is on the rise in many organizations. Virtual meetings require just as much forethought and design as face to face meetings in order to have bottom line impact. All too often on-line meetings have poor attendance or problems in execution because people do not know how to design them well. It's not enough to simply know how the technology works, it's also necessary to understand how to design the human interaction that will take place through the technology.

Philosophy: Most meetings are broadcast in nature. In other words, we often bring people together to tell them something. Philosophically, this approach needs to change. We need to engage participants through interaction. Instead of just "broadcasting" a speech or performance from the stage, it is critical to fully connect, inform, and engage meeting participants. Creating ways for participants to interact in meaningful ways with each other and with the presenters is at the heart of making meetings more productive and profitable. In interactive meetings new ideas are generated, best practices are shared, executives can build ownership for ideas rather than just creating "buy-in," and participants can learn from each other as well as from the experts. When there's a wealth of intellectual capital in one room at one time, it's essential to harness it and make it work for the whole organization.

Paramount to a more interactive philosophy is the need for flawless follow-up. Leaders and communicators alike need to insure that action is taken as a result of the interaction at the meeting. Nothing is worse than asking for participation and input and then doing nothing with it. Lack of follow-through will obliterate any enthusiasm for change and replace it with cynicism.

Approaches: Whether your meeting is large or small, you need to carefully consider what interactive methods and technologies are most appropriate to making it work. And as you consider different approaches, it's important to remember that the boundaries of the meeting can be extended beyond the actual meeting dates. By interweaving online interaction with face to face interaction, you can create highly strategic meetings.

Large group methods such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space or Future Search can enhance the quality of your face to face interaction. Technologies such as hand-held voting, qualitative data collection and sharing, and interactive badges are also helpful in face to face meetings.

In between your face to face get-togethers, there are many media that can help to keep people connected. In the call-out, you can see are a range of technologies that could help you extend the boundaries of a meeting either before or after you have met in person.