How to start evaluate and improve your meetings in just four simple steps

Are you familiar with the "Return on Time Invested" (ROTI) method? This is a quick and easy method to check whether meetings add value to their participants, as well as making them more effective. Typically, this method is implemented after meetings using post-its and a bulletin board. The meeting participants use scaling to indicate whether the meeting has added value for them (5) or not (1), or leave a brief, and qualitative feedback on how they feel the meeting could be improved in the future. The person responsible for the meeting then evaluates the feedback and documents the overall evaluation. If he implements improvements from now on, he must collect, evaluate and document the feedback again after each meeting to see whether there are any improvements. If the evaluation of the meeting remains poor or even gets worse, the meeting should be cancelled in the future. This method, which has long proven itself in the Agile Coaching environment, is now finding its way into the digital age. With TimeInvest, meetings can now be evaluated anonymously, quickly evaluated, and then improved or, if appropriate, eliminated. The tool, which is based on the ROTI method, consists of four steps, which we would like to explain to you briefly.

Once you have registered and logged in to TimeInvest, you will see the following interface:

On the dashboard, you can see all the meetings that have already been added. Under Calendar, you can view these meetings in a monthly and daily overview. Under Meetings, you can see all meetings that you have created.

1. Add a meeting

If you now click on Add a Meeting, the following window opens:

Basically, the window is based on the appointment functions that you already know from other well-known software, such as Outlook or Google Calendar. First, you put in the title. Then you select the person responsible for the meeting. By default you are already selected here. After you have added a meeting description, you can now select when the meeting will take place ((First) date), at what time it will start (Begin) and end (End), and in which interval it takes place (daily, weekly, monthly, ...). Under Scale, you can now select how granular meeting participants should rate the meeting. (1 - 5 or 1 - 10). If you move the slider located at the bottom left of the window to the right, you will receive an email after the meeting has taken place, in order to send the evaluation afterwards.

If you now click on Add a Meeting, you are directed to the meeting.

The meeting you have just created will now also appear on your dashboard, in the calendar, and under the item Meetings.

2. Get direct feedback

 The meeting you just created now looks like this:

You will now see all the information you have just entered in relation to the meeting, and you can edit it at any time by clicking Edit Meeting. In the lower area, you can also see that the meeting has not yet been evaluated. To change this, you can now click on Create evaluation. The following window appears:

Now give the evaluation a name. You can also change the standard request text if you wish. This text is sent to the meeting participants. You can add the email addresses of the meeting participants individually (Add email address), or copy all email addresses and paste them in the lower field. Then click Save evaluation and send invites.

All meeting participants whose email addresses have been entered will now receive an email asking them to rate the meeting.

The participants' evaluation screen looks like the following:

3. Evaluate meetings

As soon as meeting participants have rated the meeting, you will immediately see this window. The evaluation trend shows you the development of the evaluation per each of the evaluations sent:

In the evaluation history, you can see the individual evaluations that have been sent, and by clicking on them, you can retrieve the qualitative feedback of the participants:

4. Act on the feedback

Now you know how the participants assessed the meeting. Through the anonymous feedback of the participants, you can start making improvements. This can be a different agenda, other participants, or a shorter or longer duration of the meeting. After each new and improved meeting, you should create and send a new evaluation. In the evaluation trend, you can observe how the evaluation changes. However, if the evaluation remains poor or even gets worse and the feedback of the participants also indicates that the meeting will not add any value even in an improved form, you should not conduct such a meeting again in the future.