In a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “The New Face of Face-to-Face Meetings” I was delighted to read about how much more effective face-to-face meetings were compared with virtual meetings. The article included some great metrics on the ROI for investing in face-to-face meeting:

$1 invested leads to $12.50 in revenue and $3.80 in profit

I know in my gut there is such great value in meeting face-to-face and it was great to see some metrics associated with this gut feel!

As someone with a technical background I have always used the analogy of information “bandwidth” to compare a virtual interaction with a face-to-face meeting. I believe the “bandwidth” it is many times higher, for example, I get immediate feedback if I have confused someone face-to-face (which happens more often than I would like!) and I then have the opportunity to remedy this, resulting in more effective communication. And as this article reminds us this is what makes businesses money! Another quote from the article:

“You can’t see someone frowning on a conference call”
Dr. Richard D. Arvey, professor, National University of Singapore

All of us are being challenged in the current economy to use our financial resources carefully. What we are doing here at WeaveThePeople is to leverage technology, not as an alternative to face-to-face meetings, but as a way to enhance face-to-face meetings. If you need to scale back a 5-day meeting to a 3-day meeting, our technology can help you make those 3-days count by engaging your people before the meeting begins so they hit the ground running and maximize the face-to-face time together.

Many corporations responded to the challenges of the current economy by cutting back on face-to-face meetings, hopefully this is a timely reminder that meeting face-to-face is an effective way to grow revenue.