It's true that the quantity of team meeting invitations in your inbox has increased dramatically since the entire planet turned remote in March 2020.
With so much time spent on a webcam and in Zoom, it's time for founders, CEOs, and people managers to be more deliberate about the meetings they organize, learning how to plan team meetings that both catch employee attention and inspire engagement.
We've put up a list of eight practical recommendations to assist entrepreneurs and people managers host more engaging staff meetings in this post.
1. Make the agenda public ahead of time.
Although the average meeting time has fallen by 10.9 percent in the last two years, the bad news is that it is still 50.6 minutes lengthy. Create an agenda with specific things to discuss and keep to it to get the most out of your team calls (and avoid going over).
As soon as feasible, distribute the agenda to individuals attending the meeting so that everyone has time to examine and prepare any questions or speaking points. The more people are informed of the agenda before the meeting begins, the less time will be spent initially getting everyone up to speed.
2. Make use of instruments that facilitate collaboration.
Most individuals believe that cooperation should take place solely during meetings. However, it is important to begin as early as possible.
For example, scheduling software can help you select a time that is convenient for everyone on your team. If your team is dispersed across different time zones, this is very critical.
To allow all team members to evaluate the agenda in advance and add any action items, you may utilize async communication agenda sharing solutions.
Then, during the meeting, consider anything other than your standard PowerPoint (which 29 percent of office employees despise) that all attendees may participate with.
Interactive whiteboards, collaborative note-taking applications, and online voting/poll capability are common examples of collaboration technologies used in person.
3. Assign each team member to a specified role
In other cases, low engagement can be as simple as individuals feeling unimportant or useless in a team meeting. Designate duties for each meeting participant to provide everyone an opportunity to feel accountable or a part of the activity. For example, one person can serve as the timekeeper to keep the meeting on track and another as the facilitator to ensure that the agenda is followed.
Make careful you rotate the responsibilities of the participants each week, either by having a different participant choose the order each week or by utilizing a random lottery mechanism. This makes the meeting more inclusive and guarantees that the most time-consuming activities, such as taking notes, aren't always assigned to a female coworker or the meeting's most junior employee.
4. Begin with a conversation starter
Ice breakers may feel like they belong at a college orientation, but when utilized right, they can be really successful. Your staff, for example, is unlikely to relate an embarrassing childhood experience, but they may be interested in discussing industry trends. To start each meeting off with a little banter, incorporate several sorts of small chats, such as current news, a brief trivia game, or industry-related amusing facts.
5. Before speaking, have speakers identify themselves.
As a rule of thumb, have presenters introduce themselves before they begin speaking — "Hi, Steve from Sales here," for example, works well.
This engagement strategy can assist managers and team leaders discover people who dominate the conversation and who don't talk much at all. In this approach, leaders may politely acknowledge the more chatty participants for their contributions while asking others who have typically stayed out of the conversation to speak up (and communicate their opinion matters, too).
Having speakers identify themselves also helps to better connect a remote workforce that may not get to meet each other very often, if at all. In a video conversation, just saying who is speaking might assist other team members match a voice to a name or a name to a face.
6. Find a reason to rejoice
Team meetings all too frequently follow the same pattern of sharing status updates, discussing difficulties, and/or brainstorming new ideas.
When your team gets together, make it a point to share successes and celebrate things. Celebration and gratitude may be powerful motivators for employee engagement, whether it's for personal milestones like a work anniversary or team goals like particular marketing KPIs. In fact, 34% of employees believe that gratitude is a key element in their productivity and engagement.
Florent Merian of Specify, for example, organizes a weekly meeting dedicated only to celebrating milestones and team victories.
7. Take use of Zoom's live polling function.
Even if meetings last more than 50 minutes, participants are likely to lose concentration within 10 minutes – or even sooner in a remote team meeting. Try using live polls to re-engage people, whether you're in person or online. You may ask poll questions like as:
- Do you think our Q3 objectives are achievable?
- Which of the new initiatives are you most excited about?
- Was the agenda for the meeting useful?
You may also include amusing questions like "Describe your present mood in one word" or "Pizza or sub sandwiches for lunch?" to mix things up a little. Polls and other forms of live engagement assist to capture your audience's attention, engage them in the agenda, and give a quick employee perspective.
8. Allow plenty of time for questions and answers.
Team leaders can uncover knowledge gaps or employee complaints by setting aside time to listen to their team's inquiries and feedback. A live Q&A session, on the other hand, may give immediate pleasure to participants who express their worries and feel heard, understood, and comforted.
Many teams believe that including the Q&A throughout the meeting is preferable to doing it all at the end.
Take away
Make your team meeting calls more purposeful. While you should meet with your staff on a frequent basis, many entrepreneurs and people managers feel that once or twice a week is sufficient. It makes sense in some cases, such as Levi Olmstead's. At Whatfix, Levi oversaw a four-person remote content team.
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