Team meetings can be a great way to catch up with your employees, discuss upcoming projects, and set goals and objectives for your business. However, booking a conference room and inviting everyone to come doesn’t guarantee participation and interaction. This means that you will need to think of creative solutions to increase engagement among your team and encourage them to take part in discussions. As a result, you will have a better chance of conducting effective and productive meetings, that will motivate employees to participate again. Within this article, you will find a few key strategies that you can use to keep your employees engaged throughout different meetings and encourage interaction.
Share An Agenda
Before you start a meeting, it’s important to create an agenda and share it with the rest of the team. A meeting agenda should include a number of topics and issues that you would like to discuss with your employees. Make sure you send this information a few days in advance to let everyone know what they can expect from the meeting. This way, you can encourage employees to think about what they want to talk about, as well as share any ideas they might have. If you are working on a specific project, you can also include the goals you want to achieve by the end of the meeting.
If you aren’t sure of the agenda before the meeting, then it’s likely that time will be wasted getting to the initial point of the meeting. If you have a 30 min meeting scheduled, and you spend the first 5/10 mins explaining what the meeting is about, so people know what’s coming, then that will be a lot of time wasted. Instead, you should send out the agenda ahead of time, so that people can not only understand what the meeting is about, but prepare any contributions they may have!
Utilise Engagement Tools
If you often struggle to capture employees’ attention during team meetings, you may want to incorporate engagement tools to keep your team focused and engaged. For instance, it can be a good idea to use a word cloud generator, which means that employees will be able to see their text responses to questions on the screen. Vevox enables you to use word cloud polls to give your employees the chance to share their thoughts and feelings in real-time. Moreover, using live word cloud polls is an excellent strategy to get key insights as a presenter and improve team meetings going forward.
Choose The Right Equipment
Another crucial thing to consider is the type of equipment that you plan to use throughout the meeting. This can be especially important if you have a mix of remote and in-office employees. In this case, it can be difficult to encourage participation at all times. However, investing in the right technology can go a long way. For example, it’s advisable to choose a suitable location with a strong wi-fi connection. Also, when speaking, it’s important to turn your attention to the camera as often as possible to ensure that remote workers are included.
For fully remote meetings, there will be quite a selection of equipment you will need to run an effective meeting. It won’t just be you that needs this equipment, but the whole team, too. This includes equipment such as webcams and microphones. While businesses should source these for employees, it’s not always the case. It’s also worth pointing out that certain software will need to be downloaded. Platforms such as Zoom and Skype will be extremely useful for remote meetings, as they can’t function without such a tool.
Ask Employees To Contribute
Lastly, it can be beneficial to ask employees to prepare a presentation as well or contribute in other ways. This ensures that you won’t need to do everything by yourself. Moreover, employees will be more likely to engage with others, as they will be more aware of what is going on in the meeting. In addition, this strategy will make each meeting different and more exciting, which will help you maintain a positive and collaborative working atmosphere, giving your employees the confidence and tools they need to participate in meetings actively.