To make business conferences meaningful, it is important that they be mapped on performance scale. There are good conferences and bad ones. So many man-days are lost in meetings and conferences yielding no returns. Reasons being confused objectives, unclear agenda, bad preparation and poor execution. It is important to fix accountabilities with executives conducting these meetings and hence measure shift in performance and employee engagement from pre to post conference.

Let us take the case of sales meeting in a pharmaceutical company. Performance is easy to measure since these are achievements in numbers against set goals. One could appraise employee engagement, scoring parameters on a scale of 0-5 as below (both pre and post conference)

1. Average number of doctor calls per day
2. Chemist retail audits and feedback on competition
3. In -clinic presentation
4. Scientific product knowledge
5. Implementation of promotion strategy and utilization of inputs
6. Adherence to frequency of doctor visits
7. Number of missed calls in a month out of the list
8. Number of brand conversions
9. Enthusiasm in conducting activities beyond routine work ( say, health check up camps etc.)

It thus becomes easy to map employees on a grid as below:

Period post conference, say a quarter, can be defined by the company. Desired changes as shown in arrows in green confirm that conference was a good spend in time, money and other resources. Arrows in red suggest that top executives review the same and carefully weigh and consider corrections.