How to Keep Staff Engaged During Meetings
Whether your meetings are online or in person, it’s important to keep them as interesting and exciting as possible, to ensure that everyone involved stays engaged and focused. A lack of engagement in meetings often results in important information not being absorbed or properly understood. It can also lead to lower quality work being done in general.
Since engagement is so important to your team’s overall output, here are some of our top tips for keeping staff engaged during meetings.
Opening up the Conversation
There are several small changes you can implement into the work routine to ensure that staff and clients are kept interested and engaged. First of all, it can be helpful to create an environment where people are comfortable collaborating and sharing ideas. One way to encourage this during meetings is to allocate set times for questioning and comments. By opening up the conversation to the rest of the team, you’re showing them that you trust their views and value their opinions. Having a set time for this also means there will be no interrupting or talking over one another, which could cause staff and clients to feel nervous speaking up in the future. You may also want to familiarise yourself and the staff with the ‘raise hand’ and ‘chat’ sections of your online meeting software, to avoid people talking over one another.
Utilise Interactive Programs
Following on from this, a great idea is to utilise interactive software like Miro or Padlet. While these are typically associated with educational purposes, they help encourage collaboration and teamwork. Rather than spending the entire meeting sitting and listening, staff and clients are encouraged to share their ideas, and the visual aid that Miro, for example, provides can help improve information flow and retention. If meetings are happening in person you could also suggest breaking up into smaller groups to discuss ideas. While some of these ideas may sound unconventional, they’ll ensure that all meetings are interesting and that you stand out from other businesses.
Digital Media
Using digital media like videos and images in your meeting presentation can be an easy and quick fix to keeping your staff engaged. Providing some kind of visual to what you’re talking about can also help both staff and clients retain information better. If you’re pitching or selling some kind of product, having images of the product or experience will help you greatly.
If your office isn’t already well set up for high-quality video conferencing, you might want to check out some of our other articles on the best meeting room setup for the modern workplace:
- Upgrading Your Business To A Professional Audio-Visual Solution
- How Quest Upgraded Their Video Conferencing
- Biogen’s Best-In-Class Meeting Room Technology
Does it Even Need to be a Meeting?
Sometimes meetings can disrupt important work time during the day and can become quite a chore. Before you go scheduling a long meeting, consider whether it’s even necessary in the first place. Could everything you’re about to discuss simply be said in a detailed email? Having too many meetings in a day takes away their importance and power of them, and can mean that staff may be abandoning important work to attend.
If you’re looking to optimise your staff meetings, we have a range of solutions for the modern workplace. Get in touch today.
