How to get fast, effective feedback to become a better facilitator?

Have you often heard teams complaining about the number of meetings? Are they really spending their time well during scrum events? Are they really making proper use of the meetings to inspect & adapt? Are you as a Scrum Master sensing the pulse of the team correctly?

For many years as a Scrum Master, I find it difficult to get qualitative and quantitative feedback from my team. As a facilitator I always wanted to get better. Last year I read an article on ROTI (Return of Time Invested) and I experimented with it in our scrum meetings. It’s a good way to gauge the time spent on meeting & it’s effectiveness. For ongoing periodic meetings such as scrum events, it’s a great opportunity to make incremental improvements. It’s also an advantage for the team consisting of introverts. In such cases, it’s hard for Scrum Master to get people to give feedback or even speak. But when you ask them to write their opinions, they tend to open and it’s easy to measure satisfaction rate of the attendees.

One can make it work by either using ‘Fist of Five’ technique or a ‘scale of 1-5’. At the end of the meeting you can ask participants to rate their return on time invested using one of the techniques. You can ask them to rate based on how wise their time was spent on the meeting.

You know there’s a problem if you receive majority of 1 or 2. Open a discussion with the participants to discover why and plan to do something better next time. Always be willing to make changes based on the feedback.

Even if you get a majority of 4 or 5, it's worth having a discussion with the participants to find out why the meeting worked well so you can repeat your success or build upon it. You will know that there’s an element which everyone liked, and you can work on top of it to repeat your success.

Here is what each note explains in a ROTI:

1) Useless: No value at all. I lost my time coming.

2) Useful: The meeting was useful, but it wasn’t worth 100% of the time spent.

3) Average: Value. I did not waste my time, but I did not find a real interest to come.

4) Good: Good Value. It was pretty good, I gained more than the time I spent.

5) Excellent: High Value. I would have clearly regretted if I didn’t participate & it’s more than the time spent on it.

Well, now there’s a catch. You asked for the feedback and you got it, that too instantly. Now, you must work on it.

If you repeat the similar mistakes or get similar comments from the same set of participants, it’s going to backfire. Your goal as a Scrum Master is to teach your team on how to inspect, adapt and get better. Keeping this in mind, you’re left with no choice to work on your feedback and show your team that you do practice what you preach.

I must say that ROTI is a quick, easy activity and works very well, even with the scrum teams. I will recommend this exercise to improve the formats of your meetings based on feedback from you team/participants.