As companies continually embrace staff working remotely, some employees now find themselves being pulled into an unusually high number of virtual meetings. When this happens, keeping the team engaged can prove challenging.
According to findings shared by Finances Online, 58% of businesses make video conferencing a regular part of their day-to-day operations. While that is an exciting statistic, it does lead to a question that requires several answers: How do companies keep staff engaged when so many virtual meetings are happening?
Scott Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of Banty.com believes there are several ways to host all of these meetings, without losing staff interest. Here is how to do that:
- Stay on schedule: Few things suck the life out of a video call faster than when it starts late or runs long. More often than not, people have programmed themselves to be extra-attentive during the chunk of time in which a meeting is supposed to run. Once you get too far outside of that time frame, you are asking for a loss in engagement.
- Open the floor to others: Hearing the same one or two people regularly lead a meeting can result in a predictable, stale environment. To keep the pulse of your team beating at a high rate, occasionally hand the keys to other deserving staff members and let their voices be heard.
- Create interesting presentations: So many video conferencing services allow its users to share detailed, multimedia presentations with everyone on a call. This reality should be taken advantage of whenever possible, as a constant stream of unanimated slides, or rudimentary bar graphs could lead to teammates shifting their attention elsewhere.
- Clean audio and video: If you have a dark, choppy-looking video feed and poor audio, good luck expecting everyone in the meeting to remain focused on you. Ahead of each video call, ensure you are in a well-lit, quiet space so that you will be easily seen and heard. Also ensure that your Internet connectivity is up to snuff, as the quality of it has a big impact on your audio and video
- Only organize necessary meetings: As the team leader, you are responsible for knowing how to effectively manage the time of those who work with you. Unless you have a sizable project to discuss or multiple smaller assignments that need a once-over, ask yourself one question: Could this be handled in an email instead?
“The worst thing you can do is assume that the same old virtual meeting you hold day after day, or week after week, will continuously keep staff focused on the tasks at hand,” adds Scott. “By creating a virtual meeting environment in which staff are excited to attend and participate in, you will never have trouble keeping your team engaged.”
Edited by Maryssa Gordon, Senior Editor, Price of Business Digital Network
