Why is measuring meetings important?
Why is measuring meetings important?Look back over the past 50 years, and it is clear that most business processes have been transformed. As a result, they are almost unrecognisable today in terms of their performance and efficiency. In many cases, one person is now able to deliver outputs which previously required twenty.
And at the core of this transformation is one vitally important thing. It is almost a mantra for process improvement. A four letter word which has enabled and sustained this progress. DATA.
Process improvement has largely bypassed meetings
However, one business process, the process of meetings, remains, in large part, unchanged. So, why has the business excellence movement proven so ineffective in this one area?
The fact is that meetings lack the data they require to sustainably improve. As a result, meetings are now the most complained about process in business.
At its heart meeting performance is simple
Part of the problem in measuring meetings is that we have seen their wide variety of types and purposes. We have lost ourselves in this apparent complexity.
However, at one vitally important level, the purpose of meetings is intensely simple. They exist to enable people to be better able to add value. This value is added through their work; their understanding, motivation, ideas, relationships and health. And this value is added either directly within the meeting, or as a result of it, or both.
As a result measuring meetings can be simple
To the extent to which meetings can deliver this value quickly, they are efficient. And to the extent they fail, they are inefficient.
Furthermore, people’s own assessments of the meeting are largely a self-fulfilling prophesy. They will act according to the value they perceive. Therefore, the value of most meetings is to all practical intents and purposes the value its attendees perceive at the end of it.
In other words meeting metrics and meeting feedback are inherently the same. Measuring meetings is a matter of gathering feedback, systematically.
Tools for measuring meetings
This means that we can much more easily measure meetings and their effectiveness.
- Survey tools like Hively, or similar simple feedback forms which can be created in Surveymonkey, can be used to quickly understand perceived benefit and satisfaction
- Also, the ToolChest contains a number of more manual resources to measure meetings.