From Meeting Challenges to Measurable ROI: Rethinking Collaboration Investment

Where The Impact Shows Up

For me, the impact typically shows up in four places: productivity, decision-making, employee experience, and increasingly, AI effectiveness. What makes this challenging is that none of these costs appear on a technology invoice, yet they can have a significant effect on business performance.

Let’s take lost productivity.  We've all experienced it. The meeting is scheduled for 10:00, but the first five minutes are spent connecting laptops, troubleshooting audio, or waiting for someone on the far end to hear properly. Nobody records that lost time, and yet it accumulates quickly across an organization and becomes a measurable business problem.

Then there is slower decision-making. One of the things that stood out to me in IDC’s research was the impact of collaboration quality on business ROI. What I took away is that collaboration quality is not a minor operational issue. It affects whether people can move work forward and whether technology investments deliver the value expected of them.

71% of organizations say collaboration improves the ROI of technology investments, while 44% of employees link better collaboration directly to productivity and efficiency.

This is where the employee experience becomes very real. “As IDC, frames it, Technology alone does not guarantee success. True ROI comes when people, processes, and technology are connected through strong collaboration.” That is exactly the shift IT leaders need to make. The question is not only what collaboration tools cost, but whether they help people work better, make decisions faster, and reduce the day-to-day friction IT teams have to manage.

Finally, AI effectiveness depends on the quality of the meeting experience. As organizations bring AI into more everyday workflows, that experience becomes even more important. I see a real opportunity for AI to help people capture conversations, summarize discussions, and move actions forward, but only if the information it has to work with is clear and complete. If people are difficult to hear, or important context slips through the cracks, summaries and action items may need more checking and correction than they should. For me, that does not diminish the value of AI. It simply reinforces why the collaboration environment matters. When people can be heard clearly and context is captured accurately, AI becomes more useful, more trusted, and easier for teams to act on.

The most useful conversations I have with IT teams often start when they move beyond individual complaints and begin looking for patterns: which rooms generate the most support calls, where meetings start late, where audio quality affects participation, and where users avoid certain spaces altogether. Those patterns are where collaboration friction becomes visible, and where it becomes much easier to explain why better meeting environments matter.

Build The Business Case Around What IT Can Measure

As we move forward, the opportunity is to make these everyday points of friction easier to see and easier to measure. That means looking beyond the initial cost of a room and asking what the meeting experience is really creating for the business, or what it may be costing.

Useful signals are often already there: support tickets, delayed meeting starts, room utilization, user adoption, transcription quality, decision speed, and time saved. When IT teams connect those signals to business outcomes, the conversation moves from individual complaints to a much stronger business case.

“IDC’s research makes this point clearly: poor selection of AV systems can generate a long tail of avoidable IT support tickets.” That is a useful reminder that collaboration ROI is not only about improving the experience for users. It is also about reducing avoidable work for IT, improving room reliability, and helping support teams focus on higher-value priorities.

One thing I see repeatedly is that organizations focus heavily on the upfront investment when selecting meeting-room technology but pay far less attention to the operational impact over time. That is often where the larger costs emerge. A room that looks cost-effective on day one can become expensive if it creates recurring support requests, frustrates users, or limits adoption.

One Size Does Not Fit All

An interesting insight from IDC’s work is that every organization starts from a different place. A large, globally distributed enterprise has different interaction needs from a structured organization with more predictable workflows. A fast-moving organization operating across multiple sites will define success differently from a stable environment with lower meeting complexity.

This is where IDC’s archetype framework to be particularly useful. It helps IT leaders move beyond generic ROI assumptions and look more closely at how people work, how complex the workplace environment is, how quickly the business is changing, and which outcomes matter most. From there, they can identify the collaboration investments most likely to create measurable value.

Looking Beyond Technology Costs

If you are looking at meeting-room or workplace modernization, the starting point is not only the technology itself. It is understanding where collaboration is helping people work better today, where friction still exists, and which improvements would make the biggest difference to the business.

At Shure, we see this every day. Audio and video quality, room consistency, ease of use, and dependable integration are not minor details. They shape whether people can contribute equally, whether meetings produce useful outputs, and whether AI tools have the clear audio signals and meeting context they need to create trusted results.

If you're interested in where my reflections and insights are coming from, download the IDC InfoBrief, Collaboration: The ROI Amplifier.