How to Conduct a Meeting Audit in 7 Steps: A Guide for Leaders

Your organization’s meeting problem didn’t happen overnight. It happened over time as new people joined and brought their own ways of approaching meetings. It also happened as bad habits built up over time.

Slowly, meetings started having too many people, or always ran over time, or took up too much space in everyone’s calendar. By the time you’ve noticed there’s a problem, productivity is down and meetings have become a pain rather than an efficient way to push forward and make decisions.

At this point, the way to move forward is to gain a holistic understanding of how meetings are being run at your company. And the way to do that is with a meeting audit.

A meeting audit digs into everyone’s calendars to determine where there’s room for improvement. With that information secured, you can build a new meeting culture with renewed habits.

“I think everybody feels like meetings are a problem, but until you quantify it, it’s hard to see exactly what’s going wrong,” says Shannon Lochead, who runs meeting audits for Fellow users.

Here, we’ll cover exactly what data an audit should uncover and how to use that data to make a change — all with expert tips from Shannon.

How to audit your meetings in 7 steps 

No matter the size of your business or the industry it’s within, conducting a meeting audit is simple and can be done in these seven steps.

1 Determine your meeting footprint

The first thing you need to run an audit is data about how many meetings are occurring at your organization.

“When we run an audit, we’re first looking at the total meeting footprint,” says Shannon.

A good place to start is with recurring meetings. This includes making a list of every meeting you, fellow managers and team members, or the leadership as a whole attends on a regular basis. From there, gather data from everyone’s calendars to see how much time is being spent per week in meetings for each employee.

“Of all the time that your employees, your staff, your teams spend in their week or in their year — how much of that time is actually spent in meetings?” says Shannon.

For instance, are one-on-one meetings happening weekly or biweekly? Do company-wide all hands occur every month or every quarter? 

The span of time you’ll want to check is at least two weeks, but we recommend looking at a complete month’s worth of meetings. Having this information is crucial to carrying out a comprehensive audit. 

2 Assess the impact of each meeting

The next step within the audit process is to determine the impact of those meetings, including the length of meetings, how many people are in attendance, and their cost. 

When it comes to meeting length, there will be some variation. While one-on-ones with a direct report can be short and sweet, roughly 30 minutes, company all-hands should be at least one full hour. But then there’s the team huddles and sprints. You may find that some are too long and run the risk of being redundant, whereas some feel rushed or hurried because there isn’t enough time to get through the full agenda. 

For attendees, we’ve found that the best practice is to limit meetings where decisions need to be made to eight or fewer attendees. Beyond that, you risk having people attend who don’t actually get a chance to contribute, or who didn’t need to be there in the first place.

“Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an invite with 20 or 30 people on it because I know that four or five people are going to be the only ones who talk in the entire meeting and I just see the dollar sign racking up,” says Jeffrey Sullivan, CTO at Consensus, who’s been using Fellow since 2021.

For meeting cost, you can use Fellow’s Meeting Cost Calculator to determine the approximate cost to the company of meetings, based on average salary, meeting length, and number of meetings per week.

With this information, you will start to see the bottom-line impact of meetings at your organization, especially high-investment meetings that have a high number of attendees or run for more than an hour.

3 Understand the purpose

At the end of each meeting you attend, it should be easy to explain the purpose of coming together to hold the meeting in the first place and the outcome that was reached during the discussion. 

If not, it may be time to consider why it’s taking place at all. Could it have been an email? Or maybe even a direct message to the attendees? 

That’s why, according to Shannon, the next step is to “look at how much of that time that’s spent in meetings is ineffective.”

An effective meeting is one where you could explain to someone who wasn’t in attendance the purpose. If not, that meeting either shouldn’t happen or it needs a complete overhaul. Once you have a list of the meetings that fall into this criterion that you won’t be reworking, it’s time to remove them from your calendar. 

4 Analyze the meeting agendas

Meetings with a purpose and an outcome usually come with a fully built-out and robust meeting agenda. As you go about the audit, these agendas should be looked at and even compared to each other. 

Find out which agendas come with the slide deck attached, meeting roles specified, and the most important questions to consider ahead of time, and which feel like they’re missing some need-to-know information. You may even find that some teams or meeting types are more likely to use agendas than others.

At the end of the day, a meeting will always be unproductive and ineffective without an agenda, so the ones without one need to go or be improved.

5 Find potential changes and improvements

Once you have all the data you need, it’s time to pinpoint where changes and improvements can be made.

Meetings without an agenda or a purpose? Probably can be eliminated.

Meetings with an agenda that feel a little lackluster? Consider utilizing an agenda template to take this meeting from so-so to spectacular. Doing so also takes the hassle out of creating a new agenda from the ground up every time certain types of meetings occur. 

Meetings that always seem to run over time? These either need to be extended, time-wise, or happen more often. 

Whatever the case may be, the audit will help bring these findings to light.

6 Generate a final report and go over the audit findings with your team

Once you have a final audit report, share the results with your team. In addition to what the audit uncovered,  the team may have additional feedback, comments, concerns, or questions to bring up regarding the details of each meeting. 

Ask your team members if they have any other suggestions for improving meetings in the future, as there could be something they have noticed that they would like to bring forward. Whether they believe a meeting has gotten lackluster or unproductive over the last few months, or if they think a meeting should be extended in time to cover all of the critical topics of conversation, it’s always a good idea to open the floor to this feedback.

7 Implement changes found in the audit

Conducting an audit is useless unless you make an effort to implement the changes you uncovered.

This may look like deleting meetings off your calendar altogether, making adjustments to the agenda or cadence, or making them longer or shorter. 

Another great step is to create meeting guidelines for your organization. This is a policy that outlines parameters like:

• How long meetings should be
• The maximum number of people who should attend a meeting
• If there’s a no-meeting day
• Expectations around creating agendas

It’s important that these changes are communicated top-down to the whole organization. Forging a new meeting culture should have investment from everyone from the C-suite down.

What will your meeting audit uncover?

A meeting audit can bring to light the adjustments your team needs to make to take an ineffective or lackluster meeting and turn it into a place where productive conversations happen. 

Shannon says that when she conducts audits, organizations are rarely surprised to discover that there are problems. 

“It’s something you feel, but to see it reflected numerically can be validating. It confirms there is a problem and then allows you to understand the problem and make it better,” she says.

While you may be hesitant to make a change at first, give these adjustments a chance to make a difference for, hopefully, the better.

Meeting audit FAQs

What is a meeting audit?  

Think of a meeting audit as doing some spring cleaning — but for your meetings. It’s the pulse check you do on all meetings within your calendar that you take part in on a consistent basis. When you do the audit, you’ll establish if the meeting is being held at the right cadence and that the time spent within the meeting feels productive and effective.

We all have meetings where we leave and think “what’s the point” – and a meeting audit can ensure you ask yourself that question less often. As you go about the audit, you’ll find answers to questions like:

• How much time am I spending in meetings?
• What takes a meeting from ineffective to productive?
• Which meeting is run with the best techniques and processes?
• How often should you run a meeting audit? 

How often should I run a meeting audit?

How often you decide to carry out a meeting audit will likely depend on the size of your organization and how many meetings executives are attending on a regular basis. A good place to start is taking a deep dive into your company’s meetings at the start of each fiscal year and then again at the half. 

That way, if something is amiss or can be improved, you don’t spend too much time holding unproductive meetings where nothing gets accomplished and conversation is always scattered and unorganized.