Sixways tomake online meetings more engaging
It’s not always easy keeping participants engaged in meetings, even when you’re sitting across the table from them. But when everyone is sitting in their homes it’s even trickier to pull this off. It’s even more difficult with spouses, kids, and barking dogs in the next room.
With most of America working from home now, Howard Tiersky said it’s crucial that we make “meeting engagement” a priority.
“You want people on the edge of their seat, listening, questioning, offering up ideas,” said Tiersky, coauthor along with Heidi Wisbach of Impactful Online Meetings: How to Run Polished Virtual Working Sessions That Are Engaging and Effective.
“You don’t want them emailing, checking Facebook, or just being a passive listener,” adds Tiersky. But the good news is, there are some simple things you can do that increase engagement. Some are common sense while others may be kind of surprising.
Tiersky offers the following six tips for making online meetings as impactful as possible.
1. Ask people to share a funny or interesting story. When facilitating introductions — which you should always do when people don’t know each other well — help participants get to know each other by sharing a brief fun fact or a funny story.
2 . Turn on video to squelch multitasking. Encouraging or even requiring participants to turn on their video cameras immediately makes them more engaged because they can be seen. Also, they’re less likely to multitask, which can be an engagement killer, since they can be seen by others.
3. Give people roles so they’re not just webinar watchers. Seek to involve as many people as possible with presentation roles in a meeting. “Sometimes we even do this ‘on the spot,’” said Tiersky. “For example, at a meeting to review selected customer feedback that had been received on a product, we put the feedback on a slide, picked three participants, and asked them to alternate between reading the 15 to 20 lines of feedback to the group. No rehearsal needed.”
4. Work together on a deliverable. For example, you’re probably familiar with a SWOT analysis. Instead of presenting a completed SWOT to your meeting participants, put a link to a blank SWOT slide in Google Slides and ask them all to simultaneously work on filling it in. In under two minutes, you will have a completed SWOT that represents the collaborative efforts of the group. This can also be done with a wide range of other types of documents: idea lists, project plans, lists of competitors, etc.
5. Compel attendees to use the chat feature. You can increase participation and get feedback by asking participants to enter something into the chat. Ask a question like, “What do you think is the most important aspect of our customer service?” and ask everyone to quickly go to their chat and enter a one- or two-word answer. You then not only know they are “still there,” but you are engaging with them and getting some feedback. You are in dialog with your audience.
6. Do a spontaneous poll. Most online meeting platforms have the ability for the host to put a multiple-choice poll out to all attendees and then show a graph of responses. “If an important issue comes up spontaneously that you want to poll, send a private text to a person who is ‘on point’ to support presentation needs and ask them to quickly create the poll
(it takes 1-2 minutes) and ask them to text you back when it’s ready,” said Tiersky. Keep the discussion going while you wait and then when you get the message that the poll is ready, let the group know you’d like to poll them on the topic. That will be the cue for your support person to put the poll up on the screen.
Don’t be shocked if you find people love working together virtually, said Tiersky.
“It’s not unusual to find that you get more done than ever before,” he said. “Great things can happen when everyone is present and focused, even when it’s from the comfort of their own homes. When the pandemic is over, you may not want to go back to the old way of working.”