Meeting Key Performance Indicators

In Less Meeting, you can see what happened in any meeting at a glance: decisions, actions, notes, and overall quality. But many teams review something else in their recurring meetings: Key Performance Indicators. The health metrics that tell them whether the part of the business they’re responsible for is on track.

So it’s worth asking: should those numbers live right alongside your meeting?

Why track KPIs inside the meeting?

You probably already keep your indicators in a spreadsheet somewhere, or even a full KPI database. So what’s the value of attaching them to a meeting?

1. Quick “inline” visibility to the health of your indicators. See trends and problem areas projected in the conference room and captured in the notes that get sent out.
2. Disseminate the data. Referencing the numbers as they come out of a meeting opens a lot of eyes. You’d be surprised how many more people get on board this way.
3. One place. With your metrics attached to the meeting page and the high-level values referenced inline, all of your meeting data lives in a single place.

How to keep it simple

KPIs come with all kinds of methodology behind them: goals, targets, milestones, target lines, trends, statistics. The trick is capturing something useful in a few seconds without needing two hours to understand it. A lightweight approach:

• Name — what are you tracking?
• Thresholds — when should it show red, yellow, or green? (Optional — you can just show a trend graph if you prefer.)
• Chart type — bar, line, or point.
• Data type — format the value as $, %, or a plain number.

KPIs make the most sense as an addition to recurring meetings. To update them, you navigate between meetings in the series and add your latest data point, and everything updates from there.

What KPIs should you track?

Key Performance Indicators track the variables that indicate the health of your business. For a SaaS product like Less Meeting, those might be:

1. Daily uniques — how many people are coming to the site
2. Conversion rate — what percent of visitors sign up for an account
3. Monthly revenue — how much you’re generating in sales per month
4. Monthly costs — combined ad spend, hosting, development, and employee costs
5. Daily meetings run — how much the product is getting used by existing customers

Your business KPIs might be things like calls answered in the first minute, production outages, tickets logged, tickets resolved, or pre-tax profit.

Try to think through what is critical to review in a particular meeting. Most meetings that need KPI reviews are recurring status meetings around a specific part of the business, so focus on what makes that part of the business tick.