Meeting Quality Survey

To prevent people spent their minutes in a wasteful meeting, they eat into solo work that’s essential for creativity and efficiency. Chopped-up schedules interrupt deep thinking, so people come to work early, stay late, or use weekends for quiet time to concentrate. And dysfunctional meeting behaviors are associated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability. To get a clearer view of how meetings are affecting your group, use surveys or interviews to gather data and impressions from every individual. That will help you gauge the full extent of the problem: You’ll learn how much resentment is bubbling under the surface and how much work isn’t getting done during the day.

It’s no secret that work meetings have been deemed the enemy of productivity. Meetings can be a conduit for change. A process like this one can improve productivity, communication, and integration of the team’s work, not to mention job satisfaction and work/life balance. In the end, better meetings—and better work lives—result.

Here’s an example of a Meeting Quality Survey and how it plays out: one private equity firm we examined had a rigorous protocol for running effective meetings.

For each session, pre work was sent out with adequate notice, clear goals were established, and meeting time was managed against an agenda. Group updates and decisions were consequently handled efficiently. However, as the firm grew over time, more and more meetings were added to the weekly calendar. Although they were well run, their sheer volume interrupted work flow and took away time that the investment staff could dedicate to critical individual tasks, such as sourcing new opportunities and deepening relationships with managers at companies the firm owned or sought to own. 

As this firm’s experience demonstrates, excessive meetings force people to make trade-offs concerning how and when to accomplish their solo work. Sometimes tasks get dropped or shortchanged. But more often people steal from their personal time to get that work done, a sacrifice that research and practice have shown can lead to burnout and turnover—steep prices for both employees and organizations.