Why you should get feedback after meetings
There's a cost to bad meetings.
No company can have bad meetings. Yet, in a survey by Korn Ferry, more than two-thirds (67 percent) of respondents say that spending too much time in meetings and on calls distracts them from making an impact at work. More than a third (34 percent) said they waste between 2-5 hours per week on calls or meetings that don’t accomplish anything and thirty-five percent said that they’d go to a meeting even if they knew it wasn’t going to be productive, instead of declining the meeting.
But here's the thing: cutting out meetings isn't the solution.
Well-run, effective meetings are crucial in collaboration and communication at the office. You need to cut out the unnecessary ones – and fix the unproductive but necessary ones. And how do you do that? By gathering meeting feedback.
Taking the time to get feedback after every meeting can significantly impact your team's productivity and morale.
Here are four reasons why you should collect meeting feedback every single time:
1. Collecting meeting feedback helps to cut out unnecessary meetings
Don't get us wrong – we love meetings. But if meetings aren't 100% necessary, don't have them. They waste time, drain your team and interrupt their productivity. That last one is key: research shows the average worker takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after an interruption. So, any interruption (a.k.a. meeting!) should be worth it.
The tricky thing is knowing whether or not a meeting is necessary. You can catch some warning signs beforehand (no stated meeting goal, vague invite, lengthy list of invitees). Still, the best way to identify an unnecessary meeting is to get feedback from the people that took part in it.
By asking each team member for meeting feedback, you can start to see patterns. Are meetings being held to share information the team already knows? Are recurring meetings happening too often, so there's nothing new to report? Are the wrong people being invited?
Many of these frustrations are things you won't be able to identify on your own – you need to ask your team. Meeting feedback will give you that intel – and help you to confidently cut out the unneeded meetings from your team's schedule.
2. Collecting meeting feedback fixes unproductive – but necessary – meetings
Sometimes a lousy meeting is still required. There are a lot of meetings that are crucial to a workplace like, say, – but they can still be completely unproductive time-wasters. Don't cancel these meetings; fix them!
And before you can fix them, you need to identify their flaws. Again, that's where meeting feedback comes in. And with these types of meetings, feedback is critical to the process. You'll learn from the meeting participants what made that meeting soul-draining – or even better, what made it amazing. You can use negative feedback to tweak the meeting structure, the agenda, the location or whatever it is that is taking this useful meeting and transforming it into a waste of time.
And the reverse is true, too. You can use that intel to fix other struggling meetings if you get good meeting feedback. If you find something that worked well in a meeting, you'll want to hold on to that positive feedback and apply it as a best practice to other meetings in the future.
3. Collecting meeting feedback helps to eliminate bad habits
We can tell you the basic rules of meeting etiquette: be on time, don't interrupt, and don't veer off-topic. But it's still really, really easy to develop bad meeting habits. And it can be challenging to see them.
Meeting feedback can bring these issues to the spotlight. Because how else would a team member feel comfortable bringing up how Phil always brings his pungent lunch into the meeting room? Or how Ellen stays glued to her computer screen? Or how Jason hogs the floor? Or how Max never speaks up?
In other words: meeting feedback gives the team a forum to discuss what people are doing that derails the meeting. After all, people are unique – the "meeting rules" that might work for one team might not help another team have. That's why it's so important to keep an ongoing dialogue of meeting feedback going.
4. Collecting meeting feedback checks in on your team
As a manager, you're always trying to tap into the pulse of your team. How are they feeling? Are they happy? What are they complaining about at the bar after work?
There's no shortcut to knowing how the team feels – that comes from regular one-on-ones and ongoing feedback and communication. And, as part of that, meeting feedback. Because meetings are a big part of your organization's work week, they're a great way to gain insight into how everyone is feeling – either as a team or as individual contributors.
For example, suppose the feedback for a recurring team meeting you lead is generally positive, and one team member consistently rates the meeting low. In that case, it might be an excellent opportunity to check in with that team member to see if they want to talk about anything. Or even if the whole team's feedback is negative, even after you implement tweaks to improve the meeting, you might have a morale problem to address. Either way, you're getting the necessary intel to improve the situation.