Meeting Meter Tallies Tab of Too Much Talk
You wouldn’t spend $10,000 to insure your business against a $1,000 loss and you’d be nuts to invest $2,000 on a trip across the country to close a $200 sale. Yet you may be doing something just as irrational when you and your co-workers sit down to conduct a business meeting.
Have you ever thought about what it costs your company when several of your employees are sitting in a meeting?
Bernard DeKoven, a Redondo Beach-based business consultant, gave it a lot of thought and created software to help businesses measure the cost of meetings. The Meeting Meter, which can be downloaded free from DeKoven’s Web site (https://www.deepfun.com/workingfun.htm) is like a taxi meter to keep track of meeting costs.
You enter a name and salary for each person in the room (by the hour, day, month or year) as well as expenses such as travel, room rental or meals served. When you start the meeting, you click on the taxi-meter flag and the software keeps track of the time and expenses. As the meeting progresses, the meter displays the cost per hour and how much has been spent so far. You can set a budget and, when you’re near your limit, the meter starts to beep and flash in different colors, letting you know you’re running out of allocated funds. The only way to stop the noise is to increase the budget, which is a way of saying, “Oops, I underestimated what this meeting would actually cost.”
How to Take a Meeting
The program isn’t all that fancy and it doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do with a watch and a calculator, but it visually gets across the important and often overlooked fact that, in business, time is money.
If anything, the cost displayed on the meter is conservative because it doesn’t automatically take into account the true cost of employee time when benefits and overhead are included. Nor does it calculate the cost of what the employee might have been earning for the company if he or she were doing something other than attending the meeting. DeKoven admits that the Meeting Meter “is a tongue-in-cheek device.”
“When you start really thinking about the cost of a meeting you can’t really equate it to money,” he said. “If you have a good meeting, it can have an impact on the organization that can last for months and affect people throughout the organization. Conversely, if you have a bad meeting, the cost can be phenomenal.”
His goal isn’t to discourage companies from conducting meetings but to “raise the issue that the time people have together is really valuable.” DeKoven hopes that co-workers will “start treating their time together and each other with a little more respect.”
The meeting meter isn’t DeKoven’s first use of technology to enhance meetings. Several years ago he coined the term “technography” to encourage businesses to use computers to help meetings become more productive.
DeKoven doesn’t mean employing a computer simply to display a speaker’s presentation, using PowerPoint or some other presentation program. Instead, he wants the screen to project the ideas of the participants in an interactive process.
One person, the designated “technographer,” reports and records people’s ideas and comments as they are spoken. “We’re not just talking about keeping notes, but empowering people in the meeting to build a collaborative document that reflects the best of their combined understanding of the subject at hand,” he said.
DeKoven recommends taking meeting notes using the outline mode of your word-processing program because “the outliner not only allows you to capture the ideas but to move them, cluster them and work collectively.”
Work Becomes a Collaborative Effort
The technology is especially useful if the meeting goal is to produce a plan, design, strategic vision or anything else that can be written down, DeKoven said. At the end of the meeting, everyone walks away with an outline of what was said. But, unlike a set of minutes jotted down by a secretary, a technographer’s record of the meeting is a document in which everyone has ownership since everyone participated in its creation.
“You have a document that reflects the consensus of the group and serves as a template for your next meeting,” he said. That way, when you meet again, you can pick up exactly where you left off.
I’ve been in meetings that use this method and can testify that it can help focus the discussion and give people a stronger sense of ownership of the ideas expressed. The document-in-progress becomes the meeting’s product, and everyone has a vested interest in seeing that it’s useful.
Thanks to e-mail, the Web and company networks, it’s also possible to immediately distribute meeting results to colleagues near and far. DeKoven stresses that meetings, and work in general, should be fun. His Web site has lots of suggestions on how to make work fun as well as using technology to enhance meetings.
One useful part of the site, the Meeting System IQ Test (https://www.deepfun.com /iq.html), helps you look at the communications infrastructure of your organization so you can create a more cohesive project-based working environment.
If any of these ideas appeal to you, you should visit https://www .deepfun.com and then talk about it with your colleagues. But don’t talk too long. Regardless of whether you run the Meeting Meter, your meter is always running.
Lawrence J. Magid can be reached via e-mail at larry.magid@latimes.com.
