How to Audit a Meeting
Regularly aligning a meeting’s purpose, outcomes, logistics and engagement
How to Audit a Meeting
Regularly aligning a meeting’s purpose, outcomes, logistics and engagement
Mike Stein
Sep 15, 2026
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Annie Spratt
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We’ve explored how to design the skeleton of an effective meeting:
Anatomy of an Optimized Meeting Invite
Mike Stein
·
Jun 9
Read full story
Getting the calendar invite right is the easy part.
The way you actually run the meeting
is where the theoretical value gets proven or disproven. Your meetings need regular tune-ups to assure continued relevance and alignment between their inputs and outputs.
There are four main categories of questions that a meeting audit should seek to answer:
Purpose
Does the meeting move in the direction of its intended goals?
If the
goals laid out in the meeting invite
aren’t being achieved, reevaluate and update either them or the content of the meeting.
It’s not necessarily bad when these aren’t aligned; sometimes, when a meeting naturally gravitates towards a different purpose or function than the one it was conceived for, that’s a revealed preference of your collective team that is worth listening to.
But, in that case, redefine the meeting so that everyone can prioritize and join it with the appropriate context.
Are those goals valuable enough to warrant the meeting?
Time is finite
and
every additional thing on your team’s calendar is expensive for everyone
. Hold a high bar for meetings. Are there even more valuable meetings, or other work, that could be taking its place (Value Over Replacement Meeting)?
Check in with your leadership regularly to ensure the goals are still in line with top strategy priorities; if they’re starting to drift apart, bias towards overhauling or fully deleting the meeting sooner rather than later.
Outcomes
Do these meetings consistently generate next actions?
The most common meeting mistake I’ve seen across the teams I work with is continuing to hold recurring meetings that rarely or never produce decisions or followups.
The final minutes of most meetings should be about identifying next actions and accountable parties for them. Is this happening?
Meetings purely about brainstorming should be rare, and even those should generate next actions: prioritized and assigned tasks to bring the best ideas into reality.
Is the meeting
actually achieving
its intended
goals
with regularity?
What are the three most recent significant, valuable outcomes resulting from a recurring meeting?
Outcomes don’t have to be decisions or collaborative work. Meetings can also be useful when they: preempt bad things, remove risk, share state
when it’s valuable and actionable
– but awareness alone doesn’t count unless that awareness makes someone better at their work.
How hard was it to think of three? Better meetings tend to have more obvious and easily recalled impacts. If people don’t see the impacts, they’ll be less motivated to join and participate in the meeting. If it’s a struggle, you might benefit from devoting a few more minutes of each meeting towards identifying and tracking the impacts.
Logistics
Is there a planned agenda?
This should be either a consistent agenda for the entire meeting series
captured in the meeting invite
or a dynamic agenda established in advance of each instance of the meeting.
I forgive you if you’ve started some meetings without defining this in advance, but after you’ve run a few instances of the meeting, try making an agenda that invests the right amount of time on each portion. This is often your key to realizing you can shorten a meeting.
Is the agenda followed?
Are you usually ending early or running long on certain topics? If so, that’s valuable feedback on what your team actually needs. Adjust.
Some meetings benefit from a strict agenda with tightly-held timepoints. Others do fine with a loose agenda that merely covers topics and leaves some wiggle room. What’s right for this meeting?
Principal Skinner is your meeting’s agenda, you’re the children, and the agenda’s job is to understand and adapt to your needs. Sourced from
Know Your Meme
.
Is the meeting happening at the right frequency?
A common red flag is instances of the meeting regularly ending without significant next actions or value.
If
every
instance is like that, just kill the meeting.
If only
some
are, try holding the meeting half as often.
Reducing the frequency of a meeting can also be a useful and comfortable first step towards retiring a meeting entirely.
Is the meeting’s duration correct?
If a meeting is regularly feeling like it has extra time or drifts to low-value topics, try making it shorter. If you’re
never
left wanting more, you’re probably meeting on this topic for too long or too often.
If you’re
almost always
left wanting more, then try making the meeting slightly longer. But, usually force yourself to keep discussions concise.
Is the meeting happening in the right medium?
Meetings shouldn’t be video calls unless visuals are necessary
. Is your video meeting reaching that bar, or should you try holding it as a phone call?
Could the meeting instead be an email, a Slack standup thread, or asynchronous contributions to a collaborative document? Whenever the answer to this feels like “maybe”, experiment with it.
Engagement
Does the meeting have
skip conditions
?
Similarly to the agenda, once you’ve gotten your sea legs with a new recurring meeting series, you should define the conditions under which certain people should skip the meeting and under which the meeting should be cancelled entirely.
If you’ve already defined skip conditions, see if they need retuning.
Who regularly skips this meeting, and why?
Don’t make assumptions about other people’s priorities and goals. If someone is regularly skipping a meeting, ask them. You’ll learn something about how the meeting could better meet the group’s needs.
Does the rest of your team agree that the meeting could happen without them? Ask them. You might be able to give them the time back. It’s good when people are empowered to skip your meetings;
attendance is not a vote for the value of a meeting
.
Is
knowledge captured
and disseminated from this meeting in the right way?
The right form of knowledge capture for a meeting is usually the minimum viable amount to fill in someone who had to – or chose to – miss the meeting.
That’s often a brief email, or even a decent AI summary if your tools allow, covering what was discussed, decided, and actioned.
My meeting audit template
BONUS:
I’m
sharing my meeting audit survey template
with both free and paid subscribers to help you jumpstart putting these ideas into practice. You can send this template directly to all of the attendees of a recurring meeting to gather their input on the questions above. Paid subscribers gain access to the “Meeting Audit Survey - Template”
here
, and free subscribers will receive a link to it in their welcome email.
Put it into practice
For a new meeting series, go through these audit questions after 2-3 instances of the meeting.
For an established recurring meeting series, revisit these audit questions 2-3 times per year.
When a new person to your team joins in on your meetings, check in with them on at least a mini version of this audit after 2-3 instances. They’ll have the best perspective on what’s working well and what could be improved.
The person running the audit need not be the meeting “owner”. It’s sometimes helpful for someone with less context to facilitate it, such as a random attendee. Rotating this responsibility helps empower your entire team to own your meeting culture.
Want to go deeper on this with one-on-one coaching, or by bringing me in as an outside meeting auditor? Check out my offerings:
Services
I’ve organized my archives into a recommended reading order. You can learn more about this “book”
here
or hop to the next or previous “chapter” via the links below.
Previous chapter:
Anatomy of an Optimized Meeting Invite
Mike Stein
·
Jun 9
Most meeting invites have little to no information in them, sometimes just a title and a Zoom link.
Read full story
Next chapter:
The Value of Collaborative, Rolling Agendas
Mike Stein
·
Oct 13
All of the meetings on your calendar should have an agenda, and most recurring meetings should have some sort of collaborative document associated with the meeting series, as I first touched on here:
Read full story
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