Survey Meeting Alternatives

Over the past few posts we've looked some of the real advantages to replacing meetings with surveys. You save time, you receive more candid responses, it's more convenient, and you can easily poll your employees without worrying their answers will be disingenuous. Are there downsides to this strategy? Probably.

Some of these may include: Time Creating a Survey – Most meetings these days take very little planning, and almost no follow up time. That may have problems, but at least the meetings are usually limited to the meetings. You will need to dedicate time to creating a survey and examining the results.

Less Bonding – Studies have shown that Americans are becoming more and more isolated at work, and that is affecting their satisfaction. No Stimulated Discussions – Research into group psychology has also shown that discussion is unlikely and overrated. Most people defer to the person they see as the leader, without challenging their thoughts with any frequency.

Still, it is possible that employees could start out on an intense discussion on a specific topic that may generate good ideas. Surveys will create a few issues that could reduce their effectiveness, so fielding only surveys may reduce the impact of your meetings in a way that holding meetings would not have.

Still, it should be fairly clear that meetings are starting to become more and more overrated, and as group psychology research shows, the likelihood of anything interesting or productive coming from a long meetings (compared to simply emailing everyone in a group or sending out a memo) is fairly slim When you decide to send out surveys instead of holding meetings, you save a great deal of time, improve the chances of getting a candid response or an interesting answer from an employee that would otherwise remain silent, and potentially have an easier time polling the employees that would have attended about their thoughts and feeling about a specific issue. It's certainly not a perfect method, but meetings are imperfect, and the benefits of using surveys to send out and receive information seem to outweigh the benefits of wasting your time with regular meetings. If you're interested in seeing if your business can benefit from switching from meetings to surveys, you can try having a free trial of the Survey Methods software and see what results it generates. If it works for you, there are extremely affordable monthly payment options you can use to run your studies and generate better results for your business.