Top 5 Tips for Keeping Your Team Engaged During Meetings
Both virtual and in-person meetings can suffer from a lack of engagement. This doesn’t have to be the case. Implementing a few smart tips can keep your team engaged, resulting in shorter and more fruitful meetings that leave more time in the day for productivity. In-person meetings can feature a snack or specialty coffee to boost engagement, while virtual meetings can use free teams backgrounds to their advantage. Here are the top five tips for keeping your team engaged during meetings.
Limiting Meeting Size
Before you start looking for ways to boost engagement within meetings, examine the meetings you’re holding. One long meeting with many team members isn’t as efficient as multiple small meetings with fewer team members each. Though the planning phase is a bit more involved with multiple small meetings, you will more than make up for this in efficiency and goodwill from your team.
In a small meeting, a greater percentage of the meeting time is relevant to each team member’s work. Engagement will naturally wane the longer the meeting goes on and the more team members have to sit through irrelevant topics.
Sticking to an Agenda
Make sure meetings don’t ramble through topics at random. Instead, set an agenda with time slots for each relevant subject and stick to it. Share the agenda with your team prior to the meeting so that they can prepare questions and get in the right headspace to engage with the topics.
If a meeting starts to stray from the agenda, refer to it on-screen with a customized office background image. A virtual background can serve as a whiteboard for virtual meetings and keep your team engaged and on-topic.
Setting Aside Time for Questions
One of the later items on your agenda should be a brief window to ask questions. If team members ask questions at random during the meeting, it can derail the agenda and make the meeting less engaging. Instead, instruct your team to hold questions to the dedicated time. This also prevents team members from asking questions the meeting will answer in a later section.
Asking for Feedback
Your team is the best resource when it comes to holding better and more engaging meetings. Each team and business has different requirements for meetings, so be sure to ask your team for feedback on what can make your meetings more productive.
As a bonus, asking for feedback lets your team members know that you value their opinions. This encourages them to participate in meetings and projects more readily.
Having Fewer Meetings
Finally, even the best meeting won’t be engaging if there are too many meetings throughout the workweek. With fewer meetings, team members can better focus on each one. Before scheduling a meeting, try communicating via email or Slack to see if that resolves the issue. If the issue is too complicated to sort out with a thread of messages, then you can turn on your Zoom background with logo and clarify over video chat.
Team member attention in meetings is not an unlimited resource, so be smart with how you allocate it. Try shorter, smaller meetings with agendas and remember to ask your team members for feedback.
