Meeting review – team learning from experience and observation to improve further
No matter how good your remote meetings become, the fact is they can always continue to improve. As can the teamwork they reflect.
Furthermore, your participants will be more readily able to see scope for improvement than you will. After all, the purpose of your meeting is to bring about a change in them. And they will be the best assessors of whether that change has taken place and will be applied.
Meeting review is not about judgement
For this reason, meeting reviews and feedback are the most useful tools you have for improving your meetings. And for enabling team learning. But… it is vitally important not to confuse feedback with evaluation or judgement.
The only thing your participants are uniquely qualified to assess is themselves! Whether THEY have changed (understanding, attitude, confidence, …). And that change will be as much down to THEM as it is to you and the other factors.
A healthy attitude to feedback
Feedback is vital to improvement, but its value will be drastically undermined if you take it as personal criticism. Once that is accepted (by the meeting as well as yourself), remote meetings provide a number of means for meeting review.
The simplest is a set of emoticons (which can be copied below) for participants to place their cursors on.
These can be augmented with qualitative feedback. Using a What Went Well / Areas for Improvement tool enables people to post sticky notes with their observations.
Ownership of team learning
Engaging the participants in meeting review helps to spread ownership for the results and making improvements. It provides a basis for team learning at the individual and collective level. (70% of meeting inefficiency is caused by participant behaviour.)
Feedback and measurement is often a contentious issue. But no business process has ever been sustainably improved without measurement, and meetings are no exception. If you want your efforts in improving meetings to create lasting benefit, you should consider using some form of meeting metrics.