Done well, staff meetings, board meetings and other recurring get-togethers can be an essential part of great management. Done poorly, they can be costly, counter-productive and morale crushing. One key to help ensure your meetings are done well is to make sure everyone is prepared when they come in. The Meeting Process Score (MPS) is a way to measure and track how well you as the meeting organizer are preparing attendees for the meeting. Here is how you can create and deploy an MPS for your organization.

Step 1 – Identify the key activities that need to take place before the meeting starts and when they should be done. These tasks probably include things like sending out the following things to all attendees by a deadline:

• Calendar Invite (e.g., via Outlook)

• List of Action Items (a.k.a. “To Do’s” ) from the last meeting (1 day after) 

• Initial agenda with a request for any additional agenda items people want to add (4 days before meeting)

• Final agenda (2 days before meeting)

• All materials (e.g., presentations) going to be presented (1 day before meeting).

Step 2 – Once you have listed all the key tasks required for your meeting, create a scale of how well you actually did them. This could be a simple yes or no or it could be a scale like this: zero (not done at all), one (partially done), two (done but late) to three (fully done on time).

Step 3 – Lay out the roles and responsibilities for each of the tasks in Step 1. Make it clear who is supposed to do each thing. Also determine who will be responsible for assessing each meeting against the scale in Step 2.

Step 4 – After each meeting, rate it against the scale. Then translate the total points achieved versus the potential total into a percentage between 0 and 100 percent. Hint – if your scores are a mix of yes/no and zero to three scales, you will want to make the “yes” equal 3 and the “no” equal zero to maintain an even weight across questions. Record that score on a spreadsheet of all the scores for each meeting. Create a simple line chart of the score on the vertical axis and each meeting on the horizontal axis. With this, you will be able to track how fully you are doing the required preparations and if you are getting better or worse over time. Once you have this chart of your Meeting Process Score (MPS), you should show that chart at every meeting as a way to keep you focused on it.

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