Meeting Analytics: A Guide to Data-Driven Meetings

As your team works to meet short-term deadlines and achieve long-term goals, meeting analytics can help them—and you—make the most of every meeting. From fostering a collaborative workplace culture to ensuring that you’re evenly distributing meetings throughout the week, meeting analytics can keep your operations running smoothly.

With the right tools, strategies, and practices, your team members can easily use meeting analytics to their advantage. Keep reading to learn more about meeting analytics, why they’re important, and how to use them effectively within your organization.

What are meeting analytics?

Meeting analytics are data that give you and your team meaningful insight into how effectively you all spend your time together. They can help you gain information on who shows up for meetings, which divisions meet most frequently, and how to improve meeting efficiency. They can also give your team members the opportunity to share peer feedback on what is—and isn’t—working about your current meeting structures. Fellow enables your team to easily share real-time feedback on meetings, projects, and performance. 

Thorough meeting data analysis can make all the difference in running effective and productive meetings. The insights you get can help you and your team members start important conversations about meeting formats, schedules, and everything in between.

Benefits of data-driven meetings

With meeting analytics on your side, you’ll be one step closer to optimizing your organization’s meetings. The following are some of the key benefits of data-driven meetings:

1Improved meeting efficiency and productivity

With meeting analytics, you can get to the bottom of anything that might be hindering employee productivity. From low attendance rates to too many meetings, there are countless hidden obstacles that could be stopping your team members from working efficiently. Meeting analytics can also help you spot any patterns of low efficiency in your team’s workflow, determine their causes, and find solutions for them.

At Fellow, meeting productivity is our thing! With Fellow’s meeting cost calculator, you can see how much it costs to bring your team together. Did you know that those who use Fellow spend 16% less time in meetings? 

2Better meeting outcomes and decision-making

With insights into your meetings’ strongest and weakest aspects, you can decide on a better course of action for your next meeting. Let’s say your analytics show that two of your departments aren’t on the same page. Because you have data to back your initial hunch on this front, you can be confident that scheduling a meeting between the two of them is a good idea. Supporting your decisions with meeting analytics can help you be sure you’re calling the right shots.

3Enhanced meeting engagement and collaboration

It’s no secret that when your team members feel like their voices are heard, they’ll be more engaged and motivated. Meeting analytics give your team members the chance to put in their two cents about meeting structure, organization, and goals. With their input and other meeting metrics in mind, you can think about how to spark collaborative and engaging conversations during your next meeting.

Types of meeting analytics

There’s much more to the term “meeting analytics” than meets the eye. Below is a breakdown of some of the main types of meeting analytics—and how to make them work for your team.

1Attendance analytics

Attendance analytics shed light on who shows up to your meetings and what they do once they’re there. The following are three aspects of your meetings that attendance analytics cover.

• Meeting attendance rates and patterns. To make sure your organization is running effective meetings, you’ll need to know who’s showing up. Attendance analytics can reveal your meetings’ most and least frequent attendees, as well as any patterns of high or low attendance across your team.
• Participant engagement and participation levels. Attendance analytics can also give you insight into when—and how often—your team members participate during meetings. You can use this information to think about which topics spark the most engagement and which could use more excitement or support.
• Meeting no-shows and cancellations. You can also use meeting analytics to hold your team accountable when a meeting falls through. If your meetings are frequently under-attended, your team might need to work on being in the room more often. On the other hand, if your meeting coordinators are frequently sending meeting cancellation emails, they might need to set more reliable dates and times. In either case, attendance analytics can help you get to the bottom of it.

2Communication analytics

Communication analytics can give your team important insights into when, why, and how often your team members communicate during meetings. They can also help you keep tabs on your team members’ contributions via the following metrics:

• Meeting duration and frequency. Communication analytics can shed light on how long, on average, each of your meetings takes—and how often they happen. With these metrics, you can determine which topics and types of communication are getting redundant and which you should focus on more.
• Speaker turn-taking and interruptions. When leading and managing meetings, it’s important to make sure that no one team member or division is hogging the floor. Communication analytics can give you insight into who might be talking too much during meetings and whom you could stand to hear from more.
• Meeting transcription and analysis. A thorough meeting transcription can be key to digging up meaningful communication analytics. With meeting transcriptions, you can take note of the topics covered in each of your meetings, who covers them, and for how long.

3Content analytics

These analytics are key to understanding the ground that each of your meetings covers. They can help you determine which ideas are common talking points and which might need more time in the spotlight. Below are some of the main focal points for content analysis.

• Meeting agenda and topics. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the meeting agenda is a window into the content of your meeting. A clear meeting agenda can show how often and for how long your team discusses a topic. Fellow makes meetings worth showing up to with an easy-to-use agenda builder that ensures that your meetings start with clarity and encourages everyone to contribute.
• Meeting materials and presentations. You can keep the content of each of your meetings fresh in your mind when you include your meeting materials in your content analytics. They can also help you see if, based on your communications analytics, you’re accurately and completely covering the topics in your materials.
• Action items and follow-up tasks. Sometimes, the data you collect from after a meeting can be just as important as what you collect during it. Action items and follow-up tasks can be a big indicator of where team members or divisions might need more guidance. They can also reveal where your instructions during meetings might need to be more clear. With Fellow, you keep the momentum going after your meeting by assigning, visualizing, and prioritizing all your meeting to-dos in one place.

How to use meeting analytics

The following is a guide on how to use meeting analytics to their fullest potential.

1Collecting meeting data

When collecting meeting data, choose the methods and formats that work best for your team. For example, to get a read on how helpful or productive your team members find your meetings, you can request post-meeting feedback. With Fellow, the requester of the post-meeting feedback can choose whether or not they would like the feedback collected to be anonymous. On the other hand, if you want to hold leaders accountable for staying on topic, a team member can record meeting minutes. 

When your organization’s plates are full, meeting data analysis tools and software—like Fellow—can be a smart choice for collecting meeting data. These tools can help you monitor your meeting calendar, employee engagement, and the outcomes of follow-up tasks. The right meeting software, which will securely and privately store your meeting data, can be a huge time-saver when running your meeting data analysis. 

2Analyzing meeting data

Once you’ve collected your meeting data, it’s up to you to build a meaningful analysis. Make sure to survey all the data you’ve collected and focus your analysis on the most significant findings. Once you go through your meeting data, you can use graphs and charts to help your team visualize and make sense of the numbers.

After your thorough meeting data analysis, you’ll be one step closer to smarter, data-based decision-making. When detailed, thoughtful analytics power your next meetings, they’re sure to be a success.

3Improving meetings with data-driven insights

After your meeting data analysis is finished, you’ll be all set to implement your new insights in your next meeting. You can fine-tune and implement new meeting best practices and guidelines based on your analytics. You can also make any adjustments needed to your current meetings. For example, if your analytics suggest that your team has most of their meetings on Wednesdays, you can distribute them more evenly 

You can also use your meeting analytics to make sure your meetings are as effective as possible. From clarifying your agendas to giving your team more opportunities to participate, analytics can reveal unexpected ways to take your meetings to the next level.

Meeting analytics best practices

Below are some pointers on how to run a data-driven meeting that will benefit everyone on your team.

1Define clear meeting goals and metrics

Once you have your meeting analytics, you’ll be able to set ambitious—but reasonable—performance benchmarks for you and your team members. For example, if your data suggests that your meetings are averaging 50% attendance, employee engagement might be the best place to focus your efforts. Similarly, if you realize 75% of your meetings are focused on your accounting division, it might be time to branch out to other subjects. 

The right meeting metrics can help you make these calls and many more. With accurate meeting analytics, you’ll be in the right position to set measurable and relevant OKRs and KPIs. They can also help you and your team figure out how to align your meeting goals with your organization’s big-picture objectives.

Pro tip: With Fellow, you can easily stay on top of your team’s goals by clearly recording, defining, and tracking the progress of your OKRs in Fellow’s Objectives tool. The best part? You can quickly review those objectives during your team meetings!

2Ensure data accuracy and reliability

Since you’ll be using meeting analytics to reshape, redefine, and improve upon your organization’s current meeting goals, you’ll need to confirm data accuracy. One of the best ways to do this is to pay close attention to where—and how—you’re getting your meeting analytics. Using collaborative meeting management software with easy-to-use analytical tools can help you and your team stay confident in your meeting data analysis.

As your organization grows and develops, your team’s meeting needs are sure to change. That’s why it’s important to keep analyzing your meetings and maintaining up-to-date numbers. With every update to your meeting analytics, you and your team should double-check for data quality and consistency.

3Communicate meeting data and insights effectively

What’s the point in meeting analytics if you don’t share your findings with your team? After you’ve run a meeting data analysis, it’s important that you present your data in clear, understandable formats to the people who matter. 

Infographics and short, digestible text can convey the main points of your meeting data. You can pass these insights along to meeting participants, division leaders, and external stakeholders to keep everyone on the same page. Sharing this data with your team will open the door for cross-functional meeting feedback, which can help leaders improve future meetings.

Ensure that you communicate meeting data and insights specifically, concretely, and functionally by using this free template to focus on the context, your observations, and your expectations going forward:

Make the most of meeting analytics with Fellow

Meeting analytics give you critical insight into which aspects of your meetings are running smoothly and which could use improvements. They can also help your team members feel heard since they offer opportunities to share constructive feedback and voice individual needs.

To collect meaningful data for your next meeting analysis, you’ll need the right tools. With Fellow’s user-friendly analytical tools, you can easily assess when, why, and in what ways your team members meet and collaborate. From preventing meeting overload through calendar hygiene modules to keeping your team members accountable with activity scores, Fellow makes meeting data analysis easier than ever. Productive, meaningful meetings are fully within reach!

Key takeaways

• Running meeting analytics can take your meeting management to the next level. They can help you figure out how to improve your organization’s current meeting structures.
• Because meeting analytics incorporate objective and subjective information, they’re especially powerful for optimizing your team’s productivity.
• To make the most of meeting analytics, use only reliable data collection and analysis methods, communicate insights across divisions, and set meaningful meeting goals.