Here's an excerpt from our new ebook, Meetings Are Serious Business: How to Minimize Costs, Maximize Value, and Master Your Meetings. It's from the third chapter, when we get into specifics about how to improve the ROI of your meetings by collecting metrics of meetings. It's easier than you'd think. Dive in!
You intuitively know whether your meetings create a sense of communal knowledge and purpose or whether they actually frustrate, bore, and confuse. What you need to do is turn that intuitive knowledge into data, and examine that data over time as you work to improve your meeting culture and the ROI for your meetings.
How to Collect Meeting Data
In your mission to use data as one of the tools for improving your meeting culture, you'll be collecting information that can show trends and patterns for your meetings, so you'll need a system where you can save and add to this data over time (in most companies, this will be an ongoing process lasting years). Most meeting productivity systems will automate much or all of this data collection for you; if you have access to one of those, that's the easiest way to get detailed records you can analyze later.
Alternatively, you can collect data in a spreadsheet. Nonprofit management consultant Mark Fulop wrote a great article on tracking meeting performance, including a sample Meeting Effectiveness Excel template (.XLS file), that provides a helpful starting place for creating your own tracking system.