This article covers the basics of using Inspirometers to measure your meeting effectiveness. For more advanced insight into this, take a look at Meeting Effectiveness in the Inspirometer Help pages.
Whatever steps you take to improve your meetings (such as applying the ideas and tools from this clinic) some of it will work wonders for you, and some of it will not. The clinic has been laid out as a set of resources for you to try out, so that you can adopt those that best fit your circumstances.
So how do you know what those will be?
There are two parts to this answer:
- Those that appeal to you and your hopes for improvement
- Those that prove effective in making a positive difference
The first you can determine for yourself, and there is a lot to be said for following your interests and intuition. And where your intuition proves to be wrong, you can pick this up in the second part of the answer.
The Inspirometer tool is designed to help you to determine which of your changes are proving effective in making a positive difference. It does this by polling the attendees for their assessment of how effectively the meeting worked, and adding this up into a measure of effectiveness. (See Is this fair?)
Setting the Inspirometer tool to solicit feedback for your own meetings is as easy as setting up an account and inviting meetings@inspirometer.com as an attendee to your meeting.
This simple action will result in all of your attendees receiving a micro-poll at the end of your meeting, and the results being collated into a basic analysis of meeting effectiveness. (Note: The Inspirometer can also support more advanced levels of feedback).
To maximise the quality of your feedback, you will benefit from managing the expectations of your attendees. There are a number of basic points which they might miss if they are not explained to them:
- Feedback is literally a single click (although they can add a comment if they choose)
- Their response is anonymous (as long as they are not in a one-to-one meeting)
- Micro-polls are not emails in the normal sense (they can be ignored outside of the meeting, and they can be automatically redirected to a feedback folder so they don’t contribute to any ‘backlog’)
- You want the feedback, and will use it, and it is key to making the meeting more effective for them
Essentially, they need to understand that their participation is key to improving meeting performance, and that a few seconds at the end of each meeting could save them minutes, if not hours, within meetings. The short video ‘How to provide feedback‘ will help them (and you) to understand the principles and practice behind using Inspirometer to give feedback.
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.