Embedded Files
This project demonstrates how a simple framework improves meeting effectiveness and drives clearer, more actionable outcomes.
Project Overview
eLearning Showcase | Tool: Canva
This was my first self-initiated instructional design project, created in 2021 during my transition from classroom teacher to corporate instructional designer. I chose it deliberately, not because it was easy, but because it forced me to practice the most important skill in the field: figuring out whether training is actually the right solution before building anything.
Spoiler: it wasn't. And that's the point!
The Design Problem:
Ineffective meetings are one of the most quietly expensive problems in organizational life. According to research by organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg, employees consider only about 50% of the meetings they attend to be time well spent. Do the math: if someone spends 12 hours per week in meetings, roughly 288 hours per year — the equivalent of 36 full working days — are being lost to unproductive time.
The problem wasn't that leaders didn't care about running better meetings. It was that most had never received any formal guidance on how to do it. Without a clear structure or decision-making framework, meetings defaulted to habit rather than intention.
My Role
Instructional Designer | Performance Consultant | Visual Designer
I owned every aspect of this project independently, from research and needs analysis through design, development, and pilot testing.
The Approach
Before designing anything, I used action mapping to diagnose what kind of solution this problem actually needed. The finding was clear: this was not a training problem. Leaders didn't need a course on meeting facilitation. They needed a practical, immediately accessible tool they could use in the moment (before, during, and after a meeting) without adding time or complexity to their already full schedules.
That diagnosis led me to a job aid rather than a course, a performance support decision that is at the core of what good instructional design looks like in practice.
I combined insights from interviews with working professionals and research from organizational psychology to ground the solution in real-world meeting challenges. The result was a concise, visually structured infographic built around the POST Method, an existing framework for purposeful meeting design, adapted here into a practical planning and facilitation reference for organizational leaders.
The Solution
The final deliverable was a single-page infographic designed in Canva that walks leaders through each step of the POST Method, including the key questions to ask and decisions to make at each stage of meeting planning and facilitation.
Every design decision prioritized speed of use. The job aid needed to be scannable in under a minute, visually clear enough to follow without explanation, and practical enough to actually change behavior in the real world rather than sit in a folder somewhere.
The Outcome
I piloted the infographic with a project manager at a technology company to gather real-world effectiveness data before positioning the piece in my portfolio.
The results were encouraging:
Meeting times reduced by 13 to 20% per session, saving 8 to 12 minutes per meeting
Improved ability to structure meetings and prioritize agenda items
Goal set to reduce overall meeting time by 33 to 50% over the following six months
For a single job aid with no training component, those are meaningful numbers. They also validated the core design decision: the right performance support tool, delivered at the right moment, can drive behavior change without a course.
What I’d Do Differently
Looking at this project through a learning architecture lens today, I'd push the solution further in both directions.
On the front end, I'd want to understand the organizational context more deeply before defaulting to a universal framework. Meeting culture varies significantly across teams, industries, and leadership styles, and a more targeted needs assessment might have surfaced nuances that a single job aid couldn't address.
On the back end, I'd explore embedding the POST Method directly into the tools leaders already use (for example: a templated meeting agenda in Outlook or Teams, a quick-reference card pinned in Slack, or a short coaching module for new managers as part of a broader leadership development curriculum). The goal would be to move from a standalone resource to an integrated performance support ecosystem that reinforces the behavior across multiple touchpoints over time.
This project taught me early that the best instructional designers are performance consultants first and content creators second. That lesson has shaped every project I've taken on since.
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