To assess the quality of your meetings, periodically distribute a meeting effectiveness survey. So how, with example questions and expert tips.
The 4-hour meeting week and 25 other secrets from innovative, fast-moving teams
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:
Let’s get right into it.
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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.Â
Meeting effectiveness survey questions will mainly aim to check three areas:
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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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.Â
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:
If you’re frequently running meetings, then be sure to start to measure meeting effectiveness alongside them.Â
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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:
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:
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.Â
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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:
Let’s break these down further.
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.Â
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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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.Â
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.
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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 Hugo a go. This tool 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, Hugo will help your next meeting become a complete success.
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