Save Millions With Better Meeting Presentations

How Companies Can Save Millions Each Year Without Cutting Jobs
Simple changes in communication during meetings could save Citigroup $47 million each year and a small company over $85,000 each year

By Dave Paradi, MBA, co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint"

Saving Citigroup $47 million a year is a pretty bold statement, especially when job cuts are not involved. How can it be done? By communicating better at meetings that are already going on and wasting less of the valuable time that employees have each day. Statistics back this up.

According to Microsoft statistics from 2005, the average U.S. worker spends 5.5 hours per week in meetings and feels that 71% of the meetings are not productive. More and more meetings today involve PowerPoint presentations as a means of communicating information. And poorly done presentations contribute to this wasted time. If we assume that 50% of meetings involve a PowerPoint presentation and those meetings are viewed the same in terms of lack of productivity, the annual cost of lost time for a professional or manager earning $60,000 per year is just over $2,928.

Citigroup is one of the largest corporations in the U.S. and the world, employing 325,000 people world wide. Using Citigroup’s 2006 staffing figures to create a real life example, they have 53,642 professional or managerial employees in the U.S. Do the math and that works out to over $157 million in lost time each year if we assume they work like the over 38,000 people who were involved in the Microsoft study.

If Citigroup could reduce the percentage of unproductive meetings to 50% - meaning that people only waste half the time they are in meetings with presentations, they would save over $47 million in wasted time each year. Having 50% of meetings be unproductive may not seem like much of a goal, but it would be a dramatic improvement over where organizations are starting. And this $47 million is the savings from only the meetings with presentations, it doesn’t assume that the other meetings get better.

How can any organization improve on the communication at meetings involving presentations? Here are four ways:

Spend more time planning what will be said – Too often presentations are a brain dump of the speaker. If presenters invested time planning what they would say, the message would be clearer and probably shorter.
Think more about the audience – The presentation is supposed to be for the audience’s benefit. But too many presentations are about what the presenter wants to say. A greater focus on the audience would cut down on information they don’t need to hear and make it more relevant to decision making and action orientation.
Create visuals that communicate the message – The biggest knock against PowerPoint presentations is that it is too easy to create an endless series of bullet point slides. Presenters need to think more visually and create graphs, diagrams, charts and images that they can speak to in order to communicate their message.
Have a conversation instead of a lecture – Too many presenters read each slide, never engaging a single person in the content. Presentations should engage the audience in a discussion of the information and next steps. Presenters need to rehearse more so that they are completely comfortable with their message and can be free to engage with stories, examples and interaction that lead to better results.

These savings are not only available to Citigroup. Your organization may not be as big as Citigroup, so the savings might not sound as dramatic. But if you are an organization of 100 professionals and management, your savings could be $86,625 – a pretty significant amount for any organization.

Too many organizations miss the opportunity to save wasted time and continue to contribute to employee stress, lack of work-life balance and lower productivity. Make a change in your workgroup today. Start communicating better in meetings and see the dramatic results that you can achieve.

Dave Paradi helps presenters strategically use PowerPoint visuals to enhance their presentations and is the co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint" by Prentice Hall. He offers many articles and resources on his web site at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.