However, keeping participants engaged in a virtual environment presents unique challenges compared to traditional in-person meetings. Engaging effectively in virtual meetings not only ensures the productivity of these sessions but also maintains team morale and fosters a collaborative spirit.
Read on as we delve into the engagement challenges that virtual meeting attendees face, 9 best practices for maximizing engagement in virtual meetings, and other insights that can help you deliver more efficient and productive online meeting experiences that are engaging and interactive.
In the shift towards digital workplaces, virtual meetings have emerged as essential tools for collaboration and decision-making. Yet, the absence of physical presence of team members and other meeting attendees can lead to disengagement, distraction, and a sense of isolation among participants.
To overcome these issues, it’s crucial to adopt strategies that captivate attention and encourage active participation, ensuring that virtual meetings are not only effective but also engaging for all involved.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the challenges of virtual meetings, before we delve into the best practices.
Virtual meeting engagement challenges
Engagement in virtual meetings is a pressing issue that organizations across the world are trying to tackle. To get a better understanding of why this may be happening, it is crucial to understand the various challenges that employees or attendees may be dealing with. Here are a few for you to consider, before planning your next virtual meeting.
Being aware of these can help you plan your virtual meetings accordingly and in turn, boost engagement rates.
1. Lack of agenda/ bad expectation setting
One of the primary reasons for lack of engagement during virtual meetings is that attendees don’t know what to expect from the meeting. This could lead to them feeling uncertain and at times, even unprepared and shy. By sharing the agenda of the virtual meeting in advance with all the expected attendees, you can help them come prepared for the meeting. This encourages them to voice their thoughts and participate more freely.
2. Meeting fatigue
This has been a challenge for most organizations, especially in remote work cultures since the pandemic. Considering how every interaction occurs on a virtual meeting in such a set up, it is natural that employees feel overwhelmed, occasionally. To mitigate this, it is important to assess the validity of every meeting request, and only send out virtual meeting invites if absolutely necessary. Being more mindful can minimize meeting fatigue.
3. Distractions and lack of privacy
Working from home or any environment that isn’t your typical “office” does come with this challenge of distractions. Active interaction and engagement during virtual meeting requires attendees to be fully present, and involved in the discussion. To minimize distractions that are expected while working from home, it is important to have a dedicated work station that is isolated from the rest of the house, or a “home office” set up that gives you the privacy to focus.
4. Lengthy, unstructured meetings
When meetings last for hours and tackle multiple discussion points in one go, attendees can feel drained out, leading to a decline in engagement rates. To overcome this, make sure your meeting agenda is crisp, succinct and clearly defined. Target a maximum of 3-5 discussion points, so everybody pitches in and the meeting is productive. Longer meetings lack structure and fail to effectively engage attendees, proving counter-productive.
5. Cultural differences and Individual personality
Cultural differences, personal preferences, behavioral choices and differences in personalities – all of these play a role in determining how attendees engage or contribute to the meeting. Being inclusive and allowing people to engage with the meeting in a way that is true to their personality of culture is important. Not every attendee will speak as much, and that’s ok as long as they are involved actively and contributing to the meeting in their own way.
9 Best Practices to Maximize Engagement at your Virtual Meeting
1. Set Meeting Objective and Agenda
Your virtual meeting should always have a goal, so set it in advance. Setting a meeting objective helps you better plan, manage, and execute the event with ease and smoothly. Once you’ve set your meeting objective, create a decent agenda that accomplishes the online meeting goal. The agenda should outline main discussion topics, project updates, prioritize tasks, and more.
2. Test Your Technology
Technology might be a hurdle to online gatherings. In fact, technology glitches can completely derail a virtual meeting and make it look unprofessional. So you need to test your tech tools in advance, prior to the event, including a microphone, laptop, audio system, wifi connection, webcam, and more. This ensures your meeting runs smoothly and effectively.
3. Draft Engaging Visuals
If you want your attendees to better understand the information you’re explaining, craft visually appealing content in various formats, such as charts, slides, infographics, photos, and videos. These visuals will encourage audience participants and discussion, making them feel connected to your event.
Through visual presentation, you can easily convey the information to the audience in a digital setting. Employees will be able to immediately absorb and remember information through pictures instead of listening verbally.
4. Set Virtual Meeting Etiquette
Set an etiquette for virtual meetings to run events smoothly and according to the plan. Set up some ground rules for the meeting, like raising a hand before speaking, muting or turning off the mic when not speaking, and turning on the camera when speaking. This will help ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak and share their opinions.
Plus, you can ask your employees to wear formal or smart casual attire to look professional in the meeting. Ask everyone to come to the meeting room 5 minutes early so that no one misses the start. So set virtual meeting etiquette and run a smooth meeting without any interruption.
5. Begin Meeting with Icebreakers
If you want to excite your audience and add an element of fun to the event, start the meeting with a thrilling icebreaker activity or game. It will break the ice and bring your online meeting to life, as it can add a lot of fun to your online gathering.
Here are some icebreakers you can incorporate at the start of the meeting:
- Two truths and a lie
- Show and tell
- The one-word check-in
- Company trivia
- Virtual scavenger hunt
6. Use Interactive Tools
If you want to create an engaging environment and involve your employees in your virtual meeting, use interactive tools like whiteboard, Q&A, live chat, and real-time polls. These tools will foster two-way communication between you and your remote team. The remote workforce will be encouraged to interact, chat, and respond, boosting their overall engagement.
7. Have a Short Break
According to a Forbes article, if meetings must go longer, two hours or so, then Gazzaley recommends taking a short break after 50 minutes.
Online meetings can often cause stress and fatigue, especially when they are lengthy. To prevent this, you need to have a short break for your remote team (5-10 minutes), enabling them to relax, rest, and reset. Employees may fill their physical needs, such as using the restroom, drinking water, or having a snack, and more.
8. Incorporate Games
Incorporating games into your virtual meeting will allow your remote team to have fun together, helping to create a strong relationship among them. Games will create a shared experience that helps remote teams build bonds.
Here are the team games that you can incorporate into your online meetings:
- Virtual escape room
- Online team scattergories
- Codenames
- Virtual Pictionary
- Charades
- Secret word challenge
These games won’t just elevate your meeting engagement but also energize employees during video calls and help relieve Zoom fatigue.
9. Follow-up
Follow up with attendees via personalized email after the meeting ends. Gather your employees’ feedback about the meeting. Send a thank-you note. Plus, attach presentation material, recordings, and key takeaways from a meeting so they don’t miss out on any information.
Who can benefit from organizing virtual events?
Several entities can enjoy the benefits of organizing virtual events, including:
1. Businesses:
Companies frequently host virtual events to announce new products, organize sales or other large-scale conferences, conduct training sessions, and interact with consumers and stakeholders.
2. Nonprofit Organizations:
Virtual events can prove beneficial for nonprofit organizations to promote virtual fundraising events, educational webinars, or awareness campaigns in order to reach their intended audience and achieve their goals.
3. Event Management Companies:
Event planning and management companies specialize in creating virtual events for clients in a variety of industries, offering comprehensive services ranging from planning and logistics to execution and post-event analysis.
4. Associations and professional societies:
Associations and professional communities routinely hold virtual conferences, workshops, and networking events to bring members together and promote knowledge sharing and collaboration.
5. Educational Institutions:
Schools, colleges, and universities can deliver successful virtual lectures, seminars, workshops, and graduation ceremonies to engage students, teachers, and alumni.
6. Government agencies:
Government agencies can use virtual town halls, conferences, and training events to communicate with constituents, spread awareness, and encourage public participation.
Make virtual meetings more interactive, engaging and productive with Airmeet
Airmeet is a virtual event platform that has transformed the way thousands of global enterprises conduct their virtual meetings. Remote teams love Airmeet for its advanced engagement capabilities that empower both meeting organizers as well as attendees.
From polls, quizzes, surveys, Q&As to emojis, chats, breakout rooms, and detailed engagement reports, our platform lets you design the ideal virtual meeting experience so your meetings are productive, engaging and interactive – and nothing short of fruitful each time.
Test ride the Airmeet platform today to understand why more than 4000 enterprises trust us to power their webinars, online conferences, and virtual meetings.
FAQs
You can plan icebreaker activities like:
- Two truths and a lie
- Virtual coffee chats
- Fun-question round
Quick 1:1 sessions and more.
- Keep your meetings concise and encourage two-way communication with Q&As to minimize fatigue during remote meetings.
- Incorporate interactive elements like emoticons, polls, and quizzes to ensure consistent engagement throughout the meeting.
- For long-duration meetings—provide breaks and turn on video only when necessary.
For encouraging two-way communication, you can implement the following steps:
- Dedicate a moderator to involve attendees in the sessions. You can also use polls and chats to encourage them to put forward their thoughts if they are comfortable speaking.
- Divide attendees into breakout rooms for more focused discussions.
- Plan speed networking sessions and create matching rules to facilitate one-on-one interaction among the speaker/host and attendees.
- Use open-ended questions for easy two-way involvement.
Interactive tools like Kahoot, collaborative whiteboards, surveys, polls, AI-powered avatars & chatbots, and gamification are suitable for online employee engagement.
Virtual event platforms like Airmeet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Webex meetings are preferred for virtual meetings and other online events.
Set ground rules and meeting norms like:
- Mute when not speaking
- Ensure a professional background and outfit
- Join meeting on time
- Be familiar with the meeting platform
- Raise your hand or send question on chat to ask question in middle of the meeting
- Be respectful to hosts, speakers, and other attendees
Airmeet’s fluid space, on-stage interactions, speed networking sessions, roundtable discussions, brainstorming sessions, and breakout rooms.
Airmeet as a virtual meeting platform provides diverse features and great flexibility, like:
- The platform is easy to navigate and set up
- Offers a variety of interactive tools and networking opportunities for one-on-one conversations & group discussions
- Provide 360-degree customization capabilities
- Offers real-time analytics to monitor meeting performance
- You can share resources and files with attendees
- Share surveys, gather feedback in real-time and much more.
