Just ask: How to improve any recurring process involving people in less than 2 hours per year

There’s a very simple trick that – without fault – will let you improve any recurring process that has people involved, e.g. recurring meeting series such as.: Staff Meetings, Board Meetings, 1:1 Meetings, KPI Reviews, Pipeline Reviews, Planning Sessions, Roadmap Reviews etc.

The trick is simple: ask the people involved for feedback, then listen to their responses and develop the next iteration of the process based on the input you collected.

Let’s look at how you do this in practice:

• I like to ask 3 questions:

• Rate the process on a scale from 1-10

• What do you love about how we’re currently doing it (this is what we want to keep + amplify)

• What do you wish that we changed about how we’re currently doing it

• It’s most efficient to do this in a survey tool, e.g. Google Forms (feel free to use our template)

• For processes with a frequency higher than quarterly do this once per quarter, for processes with a lower frequency (e.g. Annual Strategy Workshop), do it after every occurrence

• Now it’s your job as the owner to evaluate all the feedback and thoughtfully make changes to how you have been running the process up to now.

• Very important: Next time the process runs, explain what feedback you received and what you’ve changed in response. You don’t have to agree and incorporate every feedback point, but you should acknowledge and evaluate it.

You can obviously do above steps manually, but if you’d rather focus your time on implementing and driving the improvements you can use Writeflow to automate the dull parts of the process:

1. Send out the survey on scheduled times

2. Make sure participants respond (remind them if the don’t)

3. Ping you when all the feedback is collected, and remind you to summarize the feedback and changes to your team.

This simple flow is easily set up in Writeflow:

Using Writeflow to run this workflow also has the added benefit of making sure you remember to do your evaluations in a regular and disciplined manner. 

And here’s the kicker, you get a super important side-effect: Your team will actually feel more included and involved, and will engage more enthusiastically in the process. Win-win.

Once this approach is implemented it should take you about 30 minutes per quarter to run it, less than 2 hours per year.