What is a Meeting Feedback Survey?
A meeting feedback survey represents an online form you can send out to all the attendees to obtain feedback. It's a short list of questions extracting important information, which you can use to plan the next meeting and assess the effectiveness of the current one.
The meeting survey can provide feedback on the following;
- Meeting agenda
- Host qualities and capabilities
- Length of the meeting
- Understanding of the meeting content
- Overall satisfaction with the meeting
The reasons to conduct a meeting and obtain feedback can vary depending on your requirements.
Here’s a good example of how important it is to listen to employee feedback.
Benefits of Employee Feedback After Every Meeting
- Higher Meeting Effectiveness
The feedback you obtain through survey questions helps you identify whether you were able to achieve the objectives. It will help you know whether all the right topics were covered and was the time spent in the meeting justifiable.
Using this information, it will be easier to refine the future meeting agenda, improve the employee experience, and improve its productivity.
- Performance Feedback
For every meeting, a survey can reveal the effectiveness of a meeting and if the discussion is constructive and actionable. It will help you know whether the team has the required tools and expertise to implement the agenda. This creates a closed feedback loop, ending up with your employees having access to the tools for better performance.
- Boosts Employee Morale
As employees’ voices are heard, they feel more confident in associating with your organization, sharing ideas, and working collaboratively. When you receive feedback from the employees, it shows their commitment to effectuating continuous improvement and feeling invested in the company’s development.
You Need to be Asking Three Types of Questions
Don’t expect a single type of meeting survey to get you the required information. With a meeting having different nuances, frame the right type of questions categorized into;
- Meeting Effectiveness
Frame the meeting survey questions to know whether the meeting objectives are achieved and is accurately reflected within the content. Another set of questions here relates to the assessing the meeting structure. You can also insert questions related to time management and agenda validation. This is going to bring you insights on the future meetings.
- Performance Feedback
The questions here will give you insights into the quality of your meeting. As you measure meeting effectiveness, you will gain clarity through specific feedback and take appropriate action for the next meeting. Curating performance feedback also gives momentum to the forward movement, allowing you to build a clear meeting plan with measurable goals and a support system.
- Employee Morale and Engagement
Not getting too personal with the questions here, determine whether the employees feel comfortable participating and sharing their experiences after the meeting. Making an employee’s experience comfortable depends on the meeting agenda, structure, and the meeting host as well.
To gain insightful feedback, ask questions related to the topics covered, particularly going into how well they are covered. Moreover, with meeting surveys, you can build an environment of open communication and trust.
Conducting meetings is easier said than done. I have learned a lot about holding meetings from personal experiences, but Michael Wilkinson’s The Secrets of Facilitation: The SMART Guide to Getting Results With Groups was an eye-opener.
This book taught me the art of the structured meeting approach, wherein Wilkinson shares the importance of outlining the SMART (Structured Meeting and Relating Techniques) system. You can use this system to create a meeting roadmap and plan follow-up meeting to stay focused and achieve results. Some other aspects to take from the book are;
- Active participation
- Engagement
- Clear objectives
- Set action items
- Continuous feedback and improvement
There’s a lot to learn in this space and most of it will come through experience. And to validate your experience, you must go for post-event survey questions.
The Best Post-Meeting Survey Questions
Meetings have a significant impact on your team’s performance, growth, and work satisfaction. The following questions will help you evaluate the efficacy of your meeting, manage negative feedback, and create your survey in accordance with past experiences.
General Feedback Questions to Ask
- How would you rate today’s meeting?
Purpose: An easy question to ask your team to evaluate the overall user experience and attendee satisfaction. You can quickly know the areas of excellence and where you fell short.
Measurement: Analyze the responses to know the positive and negative experiences. Higher positive ratings imply a successful meeting; conversely, higher negative ratings means there’s a need for improvement.
- Did you feel engaged during the meeting?
Purpose: Its a subjective question, which means every attendee might have a different response, complicating the assessment of answers. However, as the question delves deeper into the meeting dynamics, you will get to know the experience of each participant and curate a better environment for everyone to enjoy the meeting.
Measurement: Be laser-focused on the overall tone of the experience shared by the participants. The success of your meetings will be evaluated by the positive and negative responses. If you have a simple Yes/No rating, the assessment will be easier, but if you are asking for specific reasons, be prepared to spend some time on the evaluation.
- Were your expectations met at the meeting?
Purpose: Find out if what you are planning or aspiring to achieve from a meeting has been achieved or not. You can either keep it as a Yes/No or ask for a descriptive response. For this question to extract authentic responses, you must share the meeting agenda to analyze feedback effectively.
Measurement: Going beyond simple responses, analyze the unmet expectations from the participants. You can also use the closed feedback loop to address their concerns and make meetings better through the feedback you receive.
- What part of the meeting did you enjoy the most?
Purpose: It's an open-ended question to ask and does not limit the answers to Yes/No responses. Use this to know how the team feels about the meeting agenda, communication, topics covered, and other areas.
Measurement: Look for recurring responses related to a specific part. Areas with consistent praise must be mirrored in the next meetings taking experience from the previous meetings. Meeting parts that have not received an enthusiastic response must be looked at and improved.
Meeting Effectiveness
- Do you think that we have achieved the goals outlined in the meeting agenda?
Purpose: Ask this as a Yes/No question with additional comments to be added. This will help you set the meeting agenda for future meetings in accordance with the responses received in the existing ones.
Measurement: A significant number of positive responses will validate your approach in setting the agenda and get assurance about the quality of the meeting. Negative responses and comments will serve as a lesson to align your goals more closely with meeting discussions and materials while guiding you on the communication aspect.
- Did the meeting discussions clearly state executable action items?
Purpose: After every meeting, the take-home lesson should be “We need to do X to achieve Y.” Use this question as a guide to understanding whether the employees are able to identify these steps and how eager they are to work upon them.
Measurement: Overall, positive responses cement meeting productivity and share insights on action clarity. You can also follow up with questions like who will take responsibility for a specific action item to further streamline the work schedule and delegate the right people for the job.
- What could have been done to better reach the meeting goals and improve your experience?
Purpose: It's an open-ended question asking the attendees their suggestions and insights on what inhibited this meeting to be great. The opinions shared by the attendees should become your food for thought and a cue to start initiating changes.
Measurement: Considering all suggestions, look for recurring themes in the responses. Using these themes from survey results as a heading you can plan future meetings, agenda development, and focus on other issues.
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how relevant were the topics of the meeting to the purpose?
Purpose: By asking a simple numeric-based question, you’ll be able to understand whether the meeting content aligns with the pre-shared agenda and objectives.
Measurement: Calculate the average score and also find the high scores that will indicate a strong alignment between the topics and the purpose of the meeting. In case of low scores, revise the meeting agendas, focusing on achieving the meeting objectives in the next meetings.
Meeting Performance
- Is there something that would have been more productive than attending this meeting?
Purpose: This question identifies the opportunity cost of attending the meeting. In other words, it helps to know whether it was the best use to meet attendees time. On average, employees tend to waste 31 hours in a month on unproductive meetings. Don’t you think asking this question can help you elevate yourself from such a waste of resources?
Measurement: A high number of negative responses means conducting a meeting at this time is appropriate. However, a large number of positive responses means either the meeting was not needed, not successful, or it could have been done at another time.
Furthermore, use the answers to streamline the meeting communication system. From sharing the meeting agenda through email or sharing a collaborative document, giving more information to the intended attendees to have a great meeting.
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how much are you looking forward to attending more meetings like this one?
Purpose: Among the post-meeting survey questions, ask this one at last to gauge the attendee’s interest level for future events.
Measurement: A high score means your meeting format, content, host, and everything else are on track. This gives you the confidence to try out other ways of conducting meetings and engaging the attendees. On the other hand, a low score should be an eye opener for making significant changes to improve the meeting experience.
Also, if you see employee morale dipping more than expected, it would be a good idea to conduct one-to-one meetings and dig deeper into the causes.
To Sum It Up
All great meetings have a precursor; they collect feedback through meeting survey questions. I wouldn’t recommend conducting meeting surveys just for the sake of it unless you don’t plan to ACT on it.
Your employees are a sort of first responders when something is starting to go wrong with the company. So, use the post-meeting survey questions to gain feedback and implement the findings.
Running a post meeting survey is easier said than done, but it’s super easy when using Qwary. We have built Qwary to streamline information extraction from employees, customers, and stakeholders.
Build a survey from scratch or use one of our 50+ templates to curate a questionnaire relevant to your needs and future requirements. Request a demo today to know more
