What is the best way to evaluate your event team's performance?

In addition to the more rational/scientific lens of measuring what you want to achieve, it can be helpful to articulate the purpose of the event and what you want the audience to know, do and feel as a result of the event.

In conference planning, in my experience, involving your team in setting expectations and goals empowers them and aligns efforts with the vision. While SMART criteria remain valuable, a fresh approach nurtures collaboration and ownership. Encourage team participation in goal setting to create a shared responsibility culture. Balance goals between aspirational and achievable for motivation. Emphasise learning from goals. Celebrate milestones, fostering motivation and the idea of continuous success. Allow goal flexibility, and post-conference reflection for team empowerment and adaptation. This approach ensures a collective journey mindset, empowering the team to tackle challenges and opportunities.

The best way to evaluate your event team's performance involves setting clear, measurable goals before the event and reviewing them afterwards. Assessing both quantitative data like attendance numbers, revenue, and feedback scores, and qualitative data like team communication, problem-solving effectiveness, and adaptability during the event is key. It's also important to conduct a debrief session with the team to discuss what went well and what could be improved. Soliciting feedback from attendees, clients, and other stakeholders provides additional insights into the team's performance from multiple perspectives. Regular evaluations after each event help in continuously refining the team's approach and skills for future success.

To thoroughly assess the performance of your team, it's crucial to emphasise their active participation. You need to include your teams during the process. Use the instruments stated to get a comprehensive perspective, both qualitatively and quantitatively, on the event's strengths, areas for improvement, and your team's contributions and challenges. This comprehensive approach, combining human feedback and data-driven analytics not only encourages your team's active engagement in the assessment but also provides you with a holistic understanding of your event's performance. This inclusive procedure is fundamental for informed decision-making, continuous enhancement, and empowering your team for future success.

I personally see debriefing sessions as an essential tool for the continual growth, development, and training of the team. These sessions provide a precious opportunity to examine your event's outcomes and your team's performance. They serve as a platform for collectively celebrating achievements, dissecting challenges, and extracting valuable insights from any mistakes. Expressing gratitude to your team during these sessions for their dedication and hard work not only bolsters team morale but also cultivates a culture of collaboration and continuous learning. This empowers your team by making them active participants in the ongoing improvement process, ensuring that each event becomes a stepping stone for future success and development.

Post-event debriefs are often overlooked and yet I firmly believe are critical to ensure continuous improvement. The debrief is an opportunity to align as a team on what went well (and should be repeated in the future) as well as areas of future opportunity. I organize event debriefs leveraging a matrix of content vs logistics and then planning vs day-of and have the team reflect on what went well and then what would be even better next time for each category (or else a start/stop/continue framework) and then dig into discussion during a 'live' debrief.

I like to start conference planning with a retrospective of the previous time the team has planned and executed a similar event. Reviewing attendee survey responses and team debrief documents is critical to ensure a continuous improvement lens is brought to the upcoming conference. As part of the team debrief, it's important to revisit which team members were responsible for various parts of the conference and what they did well/enjoyed (or didn't!) to reassess/reconsider divisions of labor for next time.