We have talked at length about the danger of unproductive meetings, low meeting quality, and the drain they are on an organization’s productivity, not to mention the cost associated with them.
The next logical step is a self-assessment of your company’s meetings, or if you are a depart manager, you will need to analyze your department meetings.
Now is an excellent time to create a quality assurance meeting agenda.
What Is a QA Meeting?
A QA (quality assurance) meeting is conducted to review the performance of the products and services of your organization. In some industries, these are sessions that audit the performance of employees to ensure that they are providing services aligned to the organization’s mission and objectives.
Usually, quality assurance meeting topics include a baseline performance and the trend for the previous quarter or month. In addition, deep-dive analysis is done to identify the “What Went Well” and the “Do Better” situations.
The QA team is an essential part of every organization because it identifies ways to maintain excellent customer satisfaction and productivity levels.
What Are Quality Assurance Activities?
One of the roles of a QA team is to get constructive feedback on activities being done in the organization, including meetings.
The conventional way would be to hand out printed surveys. These would be collected by the end of the day after employees filled them. Surveys can include a quality assurance meeting agenda template where meeting participants are asked to grade the meeting.
The survey results can summarize how your employees rate your department or company meetings and let you know their general feelings afterward. For instance, employees can share whether they feel empowered or frustrated after attending a meeting.
Surveys can use specific parameters like:
- Grade A for productive, timely, informative meetings
- Grade B for somewhat informative and somewhat effective meetings
- Grade C for not really productive or informative
- Grade D, a waste of time
- Grade F, the worst meeting ever
After the survey, the QA team typically reviews the existing tools used to organize and manage your meetings.
What Should Be Included In A Meeting Agenda?
The main things that need to be included in a meeting agenda are:
- Meeting’s goals
- Participant inputs
- Questions that need addressing
- Time allotted to discussions, attendee participation
- The purpose for individual tasks
- Speaker order, time, and topics
The most common complaint of participants is not knowing why there’s a meeting and their specific role in the meeting. This is where a web application like AgreeDo comes in—it can help you streamline and organize your meeting agenda.
You can address that employee dissatisfaction through our collaboration tools, allowing your participants to review an agenda before a meeting and add or suggest items for the agenda.
Gone are the days of going back and forth in an email to put together an agenda. AgreeDo helps create your agenda, run your meeting, and track your meeting minutes all in one place. From an employee’s perspective, knowing what to expect beforehand will give them time to prepare.
And in an internal quality assurance meeting agenda, you would earn an A for your quality meeting review score.
Another element that QAs look into when reviewing your meeting would be the purpose, including content. Your meeting agenda can quickly answer this as well.
Sure, you love spontaneity, but meetings need to have a structure and guide. It should have time allotted to share information, discuss and brainstorm for everyone, create an action registry, open the floor for Q&As and clarification. Lastly, every meeting should end with a side note that your purpose of calling for one was met.
How Do You Motivate a QA team?
Organizations often misunderstand the QA team. They are perceived as the bad cops of the company whose intention is to highlight the wrong, not working, and ineffective.
It is so easy to get demotivated if you are part of the quality assurance department. After all, hardly anyone wants to talk to you for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
However, if you want your company to continue getting better and avoid repeating mistakes, you must learn to acknowledge and listen to your QAs’ recommendations. It is equally important to correct your employees’ attitude towards the QA team. After all, a quality assurance team meeting agenda is driven by the objective of finding ways to improve and get better continuously. The QA team doesn’t just identify faults, but they help develop action plans to turn your organization’s weaknesses into strengths.
If you are the leader, you don’t need to adapt automatically and implement their recommendations instantly. Considering suggestions with an open and logical mind is enough for this team to continue finding ways to improve and grow.
Motivating a QA team is almost the same as any department. Acknowledge them, appreciate their impact on the organization, recognize their efforts, and hear them out objectively before refusing or categorizing their recommendations as costly, unproven, or ineffective.
Conclusion
It is not easy to step outside your comfort zone to restructure how your company or department conducts meetings. However, the reward of efficient, organized, and productive meetings are well worth it, especially if you have a tool like AgreeDo to partner with.