Ever join, or even schedule your own meeting and find the following?
- There is no agenda?
- There are 10 or more people in the meeting with only about 2 or 3 of them actually saying anything or contributing at all?
- The discussion just has no focus, goes off on tangents and half the meeting is wasted discussing something entirely irrelevant?
- You all leave the meeting wondering why it happened and what the next steps are?
If you answered no to the above, then stop reading all your meetings are perfect, have a gold star. If you answered yes to any or all of them then read on as Viva Insights has 2 new features that can help combat this.
Meeting Effectiveness Surveys
There is a new feature rolling out to Viva Insights and it has some real value.
It will allow you to evaluate how effectively your meetings helped you to achieve business goals. The attendees of your meetings will get the opportunity to give feedback to you in a meeting effectiveness survey. As with everything in Viva Insights its got privacy at the core of it. The feedback will be private to yourself and will only request survey feedback on meetings that have more than 5 people attending.
These surveys will be displayed at the end of selected meetings and have the below 3 questions attached.
- What made the meeting a success? Choose from: agenda, focused discussions, attendee participation and clear next steps.
- What would have made it better? Choose from: agenda, focused discussions, attendee participation and clear next steps.
- How effective was the meeting at achieving its business goals? Answered with a star rating.
Then for a meeting organiser who has a Viva Insights License they will be able to see a set of results in the Viva Insights app within their Teams client. Including an aggregated view of their star rating but also anonymous meeting feedback. It will also then give them insights on how their meetings succeeded but also how they may be able to improve them.
This feature is set to “on” by default but for those IT Admins out there you can globally turn it off or have it set to on for specific people. A nice feature is that you can allow the user to opt in or out of this feature as well.
I know, survey fatigue is real, I feel the struggle so Microsoft have already thought about this and to mitigate it only 10% of qualifying meetings get the feedback survey sent out and of course they are totally optional (but I think it’s really important to build up this kind of info so everyone can improve). I know I’d love to have feedback on this to make sure my meetings are adding value and are as effective as they can be.
Effective Meeting Plans
Now, these are shared plans that people can setup for themselves and your co-workers which will help people develop more healthy meeting habits. There are 3 ways in which you can customise your meeting plans, and it’s not just some random things to do. Oh no, it’s backed up by real science that these things are better for us.
- Shorten the length of all your meetings – Using this will automagically set your meetings to be shorter than your typical half hour/1hour or even longer chunks. You can set a meeting to start late or finish early, it will give people a nice 5 mins between back-to-back meetings meaning they can go make a cup of tea or whatever other thing you desperately need to do 🙂
- Enable meeting effectiveness surveys – If you have got this far into this blog post you should know what these are by now!
- Automatically make every meeting a Teams meeting – This will shove that Teams meeting link into all your meetings which is really important actually from an inclusion perspective as it means in can be both in-person and remote.
Meeting effectiveness surveys is GA right now and the plans are due by the end of the month. I personally really like these new features and I’ve already turned them on within my own Viva Insights app and can’t wait to start getting some feedback and also giving back by making my meetings end a little early (its important that we stick to this bit).