How To Increase Engagement During Virtual Meetings

We have all been forced to learn very quickly how to perfect a Zoom meeting. From making sure we have dressed appropriately, to making sure our microphones are off mute when we speak. Virtual meetings are definitely here to stay but knowing how you can increase engagement during virtual meetings is a tricky one. If you have one of those days where you have back-to-back meetings on Zoom, it can be easy to lose interest and become demotivated.

With a bit of creative thinking there are a few ways in which you can increase engagement during virtual meetings:

1. Make sure your technology is up to date

Virtual meetings often rely on the likes of Zoom and Teams, but these aren’t your only options. There are lots of other collaborative communication tools which your team can use in between meetings to share ideas and general office banter. Slack is very popular, as well as Trello and G-Suite for file sharing.

2. Give team members specific roles

Encouraging active participation is key when it comes to virtual meetings. If you assign different roles to your employees, they will feel more involved and therefore motivated. Here are a couple of ideas for roles to get you started:

• A meeting facilitator who creates the agenda
• A timekeeper who makes sure the meeting doesn’t go on for too long
• A notetaker who takes minutes and reports on the actions from the meeting

By having specific roles during virtual meetings, you will also be encouraging people to ask questions in order to make sure they have all of the information they need. It helps with accountability too. If the team know someone is taking notes and these will be circulated after, they will be more driven to participate.

3. Schedule breaks for long meetings

Just like you would let your staff go off and make a cup of coffee whenever they wanted during the working day, this still needs to be applied to virtual meetings. To help increase engagement during virtual meetings try to keep meetings to a maximum of 1 hour long. If they do overrun make sure your team have a break. There is nothing worse than a monotonous meeting, so you need to find ways of mixing things up. Breaks are the best way to do this.

4. Don’t schedule too many meetings at a time

When too many meetings are booked into the diary, it can be difficult to get normal work done. If your team are struggling for time, they may well start doing smaller jobs such as answering emails whilst on a meeting, which is not ideal. By having a structured agenda you will soon be able to identify if the issues that have arisen could have been answered via email rather than a virtual meeting.

5. Don’t make all meetings formal

Managing a remote workforce can be a challenge. So whilst work is the main priority, it is okay to make things a little less formal sometimes too. Working from home can make people feel very disconnected from their colleagues and management teams. You need to make sure that you are on hand to help your staff overcome any challenges they have – professionally and personally.

Regular check-ins are a great way to help employees feel more connected.  It also helps to demonstrate that the company cares about its staff not just about bringing revenue in. Think of this more like the conversations you would have in passing in the staff kitchen. Scheduling monthly virtual coffee breaks with your team could really make the difference when it comes to morale.