What if you could find out exactly what your team really thinks of your meetings — using just three colours and sixty seconds? Use the traffic light system.

Green. Amber. Red.

Three colours. Two minutes. More honest feedback than most organisations gather in an entire year.

Here’s how it works: at the end of a meeting, ask every person present to rate it — green for “this meeting was a good use of my time,” amber for “mixed – some value, some waste,” red for “I could have been better employed elsewhere.”

No explanations required. No justifications. Just an honest colour, given quickly, before the social pressure of group conformity has time to settle in.

Why Traditional Feedback Fails

Ask people formally whether your meetings are productive and you’ll get diplomatic answers. “Fine.” “Pretty good.” “Could be tighter, maybe.” Nobody wants to be the person who says out loud, to their manager or peers, that the last two hours were a waste of time.

The traffic light method bypasses this. It’s fast enough that people respond instinctively. It’s visual enough that patterns are immediately apparent. And it creates psychological safety around honesty because the format itself — a colour, not a critique — feels less threatening to offer and easier to receive.

What the Colours Tell You

A roomful of green lights is genuinely reassuring — if you believe them. If your meetings consistently earn green, you’re doing something right. If you suddenly see a shift to amber or red after a change in format or frequency, you have a signal worth investigating.

A mixed result — some greens, some ambers, some reds — is actually the most informative outcome. It tells you that the meeting is working for some people and not others, which immediately prompts the right question: why? Are some participants not getting the information they need? Are some people attending who don’t need to be there? Is the agenda structured in a way that front-loads value for certain functions and not others?

A predominantly red result is confronting. But it’s also enormously valuable, because it’s honest data you can act on. The worst outcome is not getting red lights. The worst outcome is never asking the question at all — continuing to run meetings that people find wasteful without ever finding out.

Using the Results

The traffic light method only has value if you use what it tells you. Collecting the feedback and then doing nothing with it — or worse, defending the current format against it — is worse than not asking.

When you see a pattern — consistent amber, recurring reds for specific types of meetings or agenda items — investigate it. Ask follow-up questions. “What would make this more valuable for you?” “What could we remove or change?” “Is there someone in this meeting who doesn’t need to be here, or someone who isn’t here who should be?”

These conversations are rarely comfortable. They are almost always productive.

A Variant Worth Trying

If you want richer data, you can extend the traffic light slightly. Ask for the colour and one word. Green — productive. Amber — unfocused. Red — unnecessary. The single word alongside the colour gives you a category of feedback that helps you understand what specifically isn’t working.

Another variant: give people a sticky note with their colour as they leave, placed on a chart near the door. It’s visible to everyone, it’s quick, and seeing the collective result displayed immediately has its own energising effect — it signals that this organisation takes feedback seriously enough to gather it and display it transparently.

The Bigger Principle

The traffic light test is, at its heart, an accountability mechanism. It asks: are we being respectful of each other’s time? Are these meetings earning their place in the calendar?

Most organisations never systematically ask that question. They assume their meetings are working unless someone raises a complaint loud enough to be heard. The traffic light method makes the question routine — which means the signal it surfaces is much earlier and much more useful.

Start with your next meeting. It costs nothing but two minutes at the end. What you learn may be worth far more than the meeting itself.