Assess attendee preparedness with the Meeting Engagement Score™

The Meeting Engagement Score™ from Decisions is a proprietary, AI-driven measurement that assesses meeting preparation based on indicators of attendee engagement and
agenda quality.

Meetings with a Decisions agenda are assigned a Meeting Engagement Score™ that ranges from 0 to 100 and is weighted toward the most important agenda topics. Individual behaviors are not tracked – the score is anonymously calculated at the meeting level.

The average Meeting Engagement Score™ last year was 28 percent.

Decisions CTO Oddleif Halvorsen, who spearheaded development of the score, said, “Leading research suggests participants who prepare for a meeting in advance make more informed decisions during the meeting. We created the Meeting Engagement Score™ as an input for teams and meeting organizers to identify opportunities to better plan and run
their meetings.”  

While the average score was 28 percent, many Decisions customers saw higher scores when they used the information as a catalyst to change their meeting process.

Halvorsen continued, “Many attendees do not have enough time to prepare for meetings,
so they might only glance at the agenda. The algorithm looks for meaningful agenda engagement, such as reviewing attachments, suggesting agenda topics and leaving comments. Another common challenge is that the agenda is shared too close to the meeting or lacks enough detail for attendees to adequately prepare. Knowing this information, a team can discuss ways to change their meeting, such as moving the meeting time or limiting the number of topics they try to accomplish in a single meeting.”

Why Is Meeting Preparation Important?
Meetings are where decisions are made. When attendees are not prepared for the meeting, the implications range from wasting time to poor decision-making that can negatively impact business performance.

Despite the confidence in our decision-making, research from 2002 Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman told another story: Too much confidence in our judgement, combined with poor process and lack of preparation, leads to bad decisions.

Decisions worked with organizational psychologist Knut Ivar Karevold to build the Meeting Engagement Score™. As Ivar Karevold said in an earlier article, “In my own work and through consulting with Decisions, we found that individual biases and over-reliance on ‘gut reactions’ leads to poor decision-making in settings such as meetings, where groupthink can often occur. This has devastating effects on business performance.”

Tell Me More About the Score
The Meeting Engagement Score™ is an industry first. It enables organizations to approach meetings differently, to increase meeting effectiveness and improve decision-making.

“The Meeting Engagement Score™ is a rallying point for group discussions,” said Halvorsen. “Some clients use it for conversations about improving the meeting, while others compete to see whose meetings get a higher score.”

When leveraged, the Meeting Engagement Score™ drives a change in meeting culture by giving teams an important data point for thinking critically and improving the meeting process.

I Want the Meeting Engagement Score 
Are you ready to have better-informed meetings? The Meeting Engagement Score™ from Decisions is automatically part of your agenda when you get Decisions for Microsoft Teams or Outlook.

Get Decisions from Microsoft AppSource.