By Jordan Cohen
HOW can you improve the quality of your meetings? Start by collecting data. For example, at Weight Watchers headquarters in New York City, we set up touch-screen tablets outside conference rooms to capture anonymous feedback about our meetings. Meeting participants were asked to “please rate your last meeting” on a five-point scale represented by emoji. Not surprisingly, 44 percent of respondents selected the frowning and angry faces.
Then use the data you collect to diagnose the problem. A few traditional sources of grumbling are:
- Is there an agenda?
- Is the meeting’s objective clear?
- Is advance preparation completed?
- Did the meeting start on time?
- Is the meeting’s length appropriate?
- Does the meeting have the right attendees?
At Weight Watchers, we learned that many of our meetings didn’t have explicit agendas, even though most high-performing employees knew they should.
So we designed an intervention—a behavioral cue. We installed a pre-formatted whiteboard in 10 meeting rooms. The whiteboard had the word “Agenda” at the top. Underneath were three columns: “Agenda Topic,” “Desired Outcome” and “Time.”
For the first three days of the experiment, I asked an intern to go to each conference room on an hourly basis and take a picture of the whiteboard. I expected to see photos of agendas—instead, I saw dozens of unused whiteboards.
I felt discouraged. But then some buzz began to spread throughout the company. At first it was small—a comment overheard at the coffee machine where one colleague reminded another, “No agenda, no meeting.” A week after the intervention began, I was walking by the glass wall of a conference room with a meeting in progress and a vice president waved me in to ask if it was legal to have an agenda item called “No Agenda.” Clearly, people were starting to engage with the idea—and have fun with it—even though the whiteboards themselves were still largely going unused.
A month after the installation of the agenda whiteboards, our next survey revealed that 63 percent of meetings now had agendas. At the same time, meeting dissatisfaction dropped from 44 percent to 16 percent.
Jordan Cohen is a director at Weight Watchers International