I came to Fellow like many probably do, looking for a way to make our team meetings more effective. The built-in meeting scorecard feature seemed like a dream—a concrete metric we could track! So, last quarter, I introduced a new rule: every scheduled meeting had to end with a Fellow score (the 1-5 rating on engagement, value, etc.) entered by the host.
My hypothesis was that seeing a low score would prompt reflection and improvement. The reality was... different.
Instead of prompting healthy discussion, it created a silent tension. People felt judged, especially when they were presenting or leading. A low score felt like a personal critique with no constructive path forward. I started noticing hosts would almost always give a 4 or 5, even for meetings we all knew dragged on, just to avoid the awkwardness. The data became useless.
Now I'm dealing with subtle resentment and a process that feels performative. I think the core idea—wanting to measure meeting health—is good, but my execution was clearly flawed.
Has anyone else tried to formalize the use of the Fellow score? I'm wondering if there's a way to use it as a team diagnostic tool without it feeling like a report card for the meeting host. Maybe it should be anonymous, or maybe we should only score recurring meetings? I'm worried I've damaged trust in the tool itself.
Your core insight is correct: you turned a potential diagnostic into a KPI, and humans gamify KPIs. I've seen this exact pattern with retrospective sentiment scores in sprint reviews. The moment you mandate a numerical rating and tie it to an individual's performance, even implicitly, the data is worthless.
The value isn't in the aggregate score; it's in the *variance*. Instead of requiring a score, require that the host shares the scorecard *anonymized* with the team at the start of the next meeting and asks for one piece of feedback based on the lowest-rated dimension. "The 'value' score was low last time. What's one thing we could change about the agenda to improve that today?" It shifts the focus from judging the host to collectively owning the meeting's effectiveness.
You've identified the resentment. The fix is to decouple the metric from the person and reconnect it to a process of small, experimental changes.
Mike