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Try allowing the participants of meetings to rate their meeting openly or anonymously afterwards. You might consider preparing a general questionnaire with simple questions and allow the parties take a copy with them to complete later. Leave a space available for their advice to improve the time spent, add suggestions and ways to cut the time down, methods to obtain more cost savings or generate more revenue out of the discussion.
Prepare a questionnaire with questions such as these:
- Did we make progress in our meeting on 1.) cutting costs, 2.) boosting revenue or 3.) solving cost problems today?
- Did we include too many people in the meeting?
- Did we try to involve too many levels of personnel?
- Did we discuss too many subjects?
- Who needs to speed up their delivery pace?
- Who should come better prepared?
- Who needs help or seems understaffed?
- Who seems lost in our company review process?
- Did you learn anything of value in the meeting?
- Was the meeting necessary or not?
- What can we get done and have available for all to see outside of the meeting?
- What is your specific advice to improve the next meeting?
Make alterations to your meetings to show participants they are directly improving these gatherings. When they see their advice is taken and suggestions followed, they will directly help in order to improve future meetings.
Note: Some of the companies recently in the last few years who are switching to four day work weeks are forcing meetings to be 30-60 minutes only and restricting the number of people who are allowed to come. Not only have they found that they save money (facilities shut down), but they are more intuned since they must get everything done in less time. They also have found that because it is shorter, far more is done, people are responsible to get to the point and do not waste time and fewer people are confused about what needs to be accomplished.
