Every accounting firm has an abundance of meetings. It’s a significant investment of your time and talent. Do you ever evaluate if all these meetings are effective and necessary? 

The best way to assess the effectiveness of your meetings, to understand and improve meeting performance, is to score them. But how? Here are some thoughts on how to score meetings. 

Be intentional

You want to define a consistent way to score meetings, otherwise you leave it up to each person’s personal preference, which may contradict what you want to achieve.

Get buy-in

Don’t impose a scoring system on your team; invite the team to come up with a way to score meetings.

Use your core values

Look at your firm’s core values and ask what meeting behaviours bring these values to life. 

As an example, we worked with Paul Barnes to help him define and refine MAP’s Core Values. One is ‘Be Brave’ and that can show up in meetings by speaking up, sharing your opinion and challenging team members. In other words, one or more of your scoring criteria can be related to your core values.

Score the meeting according to its purpose and outcome 

Every meeting should have a clear purpose and outcome. At the end of each meeting, ask everyone in the room to give the meeting a score of 1–10, based on these. So, 10 represents a fantastic, productive meeting that achieved the purpose and resulted in clear outcomes. And 1 represents a pointless meeting that resulted in nothing but a desire to bang your head against a brick wall. 

This is the simplest way to score your team meetings, but we also recommend gathering more detailed feedback with a scoring matrix…

Create a scoring matrix

Being more specific on meeting scores can lead to more productive meetings because you are scoring the drivers of a great meeting, not the result itself.

Once you and your team have decided on the criteria, you can create a matrix. We recommend setting five criteria that you score 0, 1 or 2 (so the maximum score is 10).

For example:

Criteria	Score
Was everyone prepared for the meeting?	0–2
Did we stick to the agenda?	0–2
Did we achieve what we set out to do?	0–2
Did we communicate openly and honestly?	0–2
Are we clear on what happens next?	0–2
Total	Maximum of 10

You can use different criteria, and weight the criteria scores according to importance, so long as the maximum total is 10.

Make sure the score you give is an honest one, and encourage participants to score honestly. If a meeting sucked, say so. And, have everyone say briefly why they gave the score they gave.  This feedback is vital for improving future meetings.

Get someone else to score the meeting

When starting to score your firm’s meetings, it’s not always easy for people to be honest and tell colleagues or their line manager (who could be a partner, director or owner) their meetings aren’t good. This is why it can be useful to bring in someone from outside to help you kick off scoring.

Start and keep going

Don’t wait for the perfect scoring system, just start and develop the scoring system as you go. If your team is honest and provides good feedback, your meetings will improve organically and you’ll develop an important business system for driving performance.

Recognise and reward feedback, not high scores

When asking for meeting scores, always make a point of recognising and rewarding participants who give good feedback. Someone can give a high score to avoid airing an issue that needs to be addressed.

Write your meeting playbook

Capture how you score meetings in your meeting playbook and use this to train, coach and mentor your team.