How to Use Meeting Effectiveness Survey Questions So Your Next Meeting Is a Success

When assessing the quality of your meetings, there are few better methods than constructing and distributing a meeting effectiveness survey. This will allow you to gather feedback from your team, which you can then use to boost the success of your meetings. Instead of wasting both time and money with ineffective meetings, you’ll be well on your way to being a meeting pro.

Upper management considers pointless meetings to be the highest cost to their organization, both in terms of money and time. This further demonstrates the need to make sure your team stays interested and focused. By refining your meeting technique, you’ll be able to create quality meetings that all of your employees enjoy attending.

In this article, we’ll be discussing:

1. What post-event surveys are
2. Benefits of post-event surveys
3. Types of meeting effectiveness questions
4. General tips for crafting the perfect questions
   

Let’s get right into it.

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1. What are meeting effectiveness surveys?

After the end of a meeting, a set of post-event survey questions are designed to measure how well the meeting went. These questions will allow you to gauge more effectively if your meetings were, to put it bluntly, a waste of time or not. 

Meeting effectiveness survey questions will mainly aim to check three areas:

• Whether or not the meeting was successful and useful
• If the meeting was a good use of an employee’s time
• Whether or not the meeting met quality and in-depth standards
  

These three fields allow a manager to understand a meeting’s effectiveness in more explicit terms. By including sliding scales (where employees can rate the discussion on different degrees out of 10), you’ll also be able to add a quantitative layer to your analysis.

These surveys aim to have a clearer objective of what needs to be improved for the next meeting. For example, suppose many employees state that the PowerPoint presentation you prepared took too long. In that case, you’ll know to shorten it down for next time, making sure everyone is more satisfied with the meeting length.

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2. Why should we ask survey questions?

The average employee in America wastes 31 hours on meetings that are deemed unproductive every month. That’s almost a whole working week of wasted time, solely because meetings weren’t up to par with employee expectations. That statistic alone should inspire you to double-check that all the time you’re spending in meetings is worth it, using meeting effectiveness survey questions to continuously improve them.

Try and structure your questions around both areas of improvement and things that went well, allowing you to build up a more holistic view of the overall meeting experience. By having a mix of open-ended and number scale questions, you’ll be able to develop and see the full picture. 

After introducing a set of meeting effectiveness questions, Gallup calculated that there is an increase of 12.5% in meeting satisfaction. Not only do these questions and answers allow employers to express their opinions, but it provides a valuable forum for a manager to collect feedback and, most importantly, respond to it.

To summarize, the main benefits of meeting effectiveness survey questions are:

• Increased meeting productivity
• Ability to streamline meetings and save time overall
• Insightful feedback gives an honest picture of areas of improvement
• Allows your team to look forward to meetings
• Helps all team members become more satisfied with future meetings
  

If you’re frequently running meetings, then be sure to start to measure meeting effectiveness alongside them. 

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3. Types of meeting effectiveness survey questions

You can draw questions from five main areas to create a balanced response from your team. While you could choose to pull one question from each section, you could also focus on just one or two to get more specific answers.

The possible types of questions are:

• General - Did you enjoy the meeting? How did this compare to the last one? Is there anything you would change?
• Performance - Did the meeting help the team hit their goals or solve problems?
• Employee Satisfaction - Did the meeting help participants feel motivated about their work?
• Development - Did the meeting teach skills that will be useful for future events? Are these meetings successful education sessions?
• Performance - Are you personally motivated by the content of the meeting?
  

Using these sections as a foundation, you’ll be able to come up with unique questions for your attendees. If you need a little more help forming your questions, we recommend that you:

• Keep your language simple and to the point
• If you want a specific answer, ask a particular question
• Review your questions with another person before you show them off
  

An open-ended question will call for a longer answer. At the same time, a numerical scale will give you more factual data to follow. Be sure to work out what information or feedback you’re looking for to ask the right questions. 

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4. General tips for successfully managing meeting effectiveness 

Although you may feel like your meetings are already a success, post-event surveys can clarify how your team actually feels. Providing this forum for discussion is a helpful way of making sure that those present in the meeting have an opportunity to express any concerns or advice they may have for future meetings.

When constructing and distributing post-event survey questions, we recommend you include the following things:

• Incentivize giving feedback
• Use open-ended questions
• Act upon feedback 
• Include the post-event feedback on your meeting agenda
  

Let’s break these down further.

Incentivize Feedback

If there is no reason for your employees to give feedback, they may ignore the survey altogether, leaving you with a particularly low engagement rate. Although some may feel obligated, others might overlook the opportunity and head straight back to their work. 

Due to this, you should always try and incentivize filling in your post-event survey. There are several ways of doing this. For example, you could note which employees have filled in the survey and update their participation rate out of 100%. Or, you could offer a monthly gift card reward raffle. Every time a member fills in one of your surveys, you’d put their name into the ballot one time.

These rewards don’t have to be large but should be substantial enough to ensure that the 5 minutes it takes to fill in your survey seem well spent for your employees. Depending on the size of your team, the amount of reward you offer can vary. You could even provide something work-related, like an additional vacation day.

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Use Open-Ended Questions

Getting a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response isn’t always the most helpful thing to find on your post-event surveys. That’s why you should try and stick to more open-ended questions that offer the opportunity to elaborate. 

Instead of asking ‘Did you think this meeting was necessary?’, you should ask ‘What would you change about the meeting to make it feel even more necessary?’. Moving to the style of an open-ended question will subtly push your employees to write more on their surveys.

However, do make sure to keep some number scales on your post-event survey. By giving employees to rank various aspects out of 10, you’ll be able to build up a more exact picture. You can also then plot how your meetings are (hopefully) improving over time on a graph.

Act Upon Feedback

Nothing is more frustrating than giving the same feedback time and time again to an employee. The same goes for an employee giving their manager repeated answers on their post-event survey questions. That’s why you should be sure to make actionable steps to take going forward after reading through the survey responses. 

For future events, you can even start by giving a brief summary of past feedback and demonstrating how you’ve incorporated it into your current discussion. Doing so will make your meeting attendees feel heard and ensure you’re on the right path towards a more effective meeting.

Considering that 43% of highly-engaged employees receive feedback once a week, feedback in the workplace can never be overlooked. The same goes for how you conduct your meetings, with the positive and negative feedback you receive from your team helping you learn how to create more effective meetings. 

Include Post-event Survey Questions on the Meeting Agenda

Your meeting agenda is one of the most important aspects of running a great meeting. By letting your employees know what they can expect ahead of time, they’ll be more prepared for the discussions that will arise. 

By including the survey on the agenda for your next meeting, you’ll remind all of the attendees what they have to do before they arrive. This will boost the number of team members that respond to your survey and ensure that you gather a more extensive data set.

If you’re new to including agendas in your meetings, try giving  a go. This will help you boost your meeting’s effectiveness by giving you all of the tools you need to succeed. From calendar scheduling to note-taking capabilities, will help your next meeting become a complete success.