772: How to Measure Your Meeting’s Success, with Rebecca Hinds

What It Covers

Rebecca Hinds, author of *Your Best Meeting Ever*, joins Dave Stachowiak to outline five concrete metrics for measuring meeting effectiveness—Return on Time Invested (ROTI), weekly meeting hours, airtime distribution, multitasking rates, and punctuality—while warning against over-indexing on cost-based or efficiency-driven measurement approaches.

Key Questions Answered

• •Return on Time Invested (ROTI): After roughly 10% of meetings, ask attendees to anonymously rate the session on a zero-to-five scale, then follow up with one question: what would raise your score by one point? Collecting this anonymously prevents social pressure from skewing results and surfaces actionable redesign feedback, often revealing that fixes belong in pre- or post-meeting async work.
• •Meeting Hours Threshold: Worklytics data identifies ten hours per week in meetings as a key tipping point. Individuals consistently above that threshold are typically using meetings as information exchange or operating in low-trust environments. A "meeting cleanse"—a 48-hour calendar reset—typically recovers time not by deleting meetings entirely but by redesigning them: shorter durations, fewer attendees, async alternatives.
• •Airtime Distribution: Equal airtime is one of the strongest research-backed predictors of team performance. AI tools embedded in meeting platforms can now track who speaks and for how long. Sharing this data directly with attendees—not as surveillance but as self-monitoring feedback—causes over-speakers to dial back and under-contributors to engage more, without requiring managerial intervention.
• •Punctuality Rate as a Signal: Tracking what percentage of attendees arrive on time reveals meeting health. Late arrivals trigger resentment and reduce effectiveness even by a few minutes. When organizers invest visibly in meeting design—clear agenda, defined purpose—attendees reciprocate by arriving prepared and on time, a behavior researchers call "meeting proof" of perceived value.
• •Beware Metrics as Targets: Using efficiency metrics like cost or meeting-hour reduction as primary targets incentivizes cutting the wrong meetings first. One-on-ones, development conversations, and team-building sessions—meetings uniquely suited to human connection—get eliminated before low-value status updates. Metrics should diagnose dysfunction, not drive blanket reduction that strips out collaboration and mentorship.