Virtual meetings have taken over many work interactions within the last two years alone. Today, 83% of employees spend a third of their work week in video-on virtual meetings. These aren’t just one-off meetings either, but multiple ones throughout the week — 17% of workers even reported several sessions in a single day. The same group of employees reported spending 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings, and 56% actively wanted to reduce these hours.
While cutting hours down can be an effective way to engage employees in these virtual meetings, other methods can make them more impactful.
At our Engaging Virtual Meetings Conference 3.0, we tackled some key ways to improve virtual meetings. However, you can get this done without investing in additional technology. You can maximize essential tech with creativity and inventive strategies.
Elevate the visual experience
Discussions during virtual meetings aren’t always exciting. That’s a fact of corporate culture and communication. But as we previously underscored in our post on “5 Hacks That Can Make Your Virtual Conference Better”, you can make the meeting more engaging by working on the visual experience. This includes using appropriate fonts, charts, and infographics. Instead of having thick chunks of text, it would be better to complement those with brief summations and minimal animations.
Add a social component
With more and more teams working remotely and not having face-to-face interactions, it’s important to form emotional bonds. Virtual meetings are excellent means to this end. Party.Space’s CEO and founder Yurii Filipchuk says, “Organizations should create an environment for non-formal social communication as part of their remote format implementation.”
He adds that these virtual meetings can and should be used for non-formal social communication as well. Although most virtual meetings tackle business matters, there should be an allotted time and space for water cooler talk.
Personalized communication
In the same vein, these social interactions should be personalized and tailored to fit the audience. Many forget that these virtual meetings aren’t lectures but opportunities for two-way communication. Leadership communication coach Michael Piperno highlights in a podcast episode that personalized communication can improve an organization’s internal dynamics, relationships, and cultures. Personalized communication includes:
- Calling people by their names.
- Identifying individual concerns.
- Providing actionable solutions for each person.
If time allows during virtual meetings, you can even go around the table to ask for each person’s thoughts and sentiments.
Integrate gamification
Games have a place in corporate spaces, despite what people may think. Games can encourage people to become active participants in virtual meetings, especially if they offer compensation or reward systems. For one, instead of asking whether meeting attendees understood the discussion, you can do a casual pop quiz with rewards. You can also gamify actions that you want attendees to take. A great example would be offering points or rewards for watching a video or downloading resources. However, Victoria Copans suggests having a limit to point accumulation for gamification to work. She claims that games should still be somewhat challenging, and making games too easy and points too accessible is counterintuitive.
You can do many things other than spend resources on additional tech. This is why our insights from Engaging Virtual Meetings Conference 3.0 focused on banking on the assets you already have, like talent and smart thinking.
Specially written for EngagingVirtualMeetings.com
By: Roana Jewel
