After nearly two years of countless virtual meetings, a new affliction has taken hold over the remote and hybrid workforce. Yep, you guessed it. We’re talking Zoom Fatigue.
Considering the importance of virtual meetings and events to help align your teams, overcoming this fatigue is crucial. So how do you? Make virtual meetings more engaging, fun, immersive, and easier to participate in sounds like a breeze. But more often than not, well, it’s not. So here’s a handy few tips to check off before your next virtual meeting.
Make Virtual Meetings Interactive
When it comes to engaging your distributed team on a virtual meeting, your primary objective should be to make sure they’re an active part of the conversation and not just a viewer. One way to accomplish this is by starting an interactive chat room for all participants once the meeting commences. This can be used for basic conversation, as a forum for questions to each other, or as a way to interact with speaker(s). To that point, another way to keep your employees engaged is to offer live polling or Q&A sessions over the course of the event.
Don’t Just Speak. Engage.
If your meeting is more information-driven, ensuring your a speakers are exciting, engaging and fit-for-purpose are a no brainer – especially if you end the meeting with breakout sessions so that your teams can engage in an intimate Q&A with the speaker of their choice as well as their own team. This can also be achieved by keeping meeting segments shorter and varying the structure of the meeting (tip: don’t put the same session format back-to-back. Just had an opening keynote? Don’t follow up with another. Switch the pace with a new format and consider attention spans).
Add Game To Your Virtual Meetings
Engagement doesn’t have to be just about polls, chats, guests, and breakout sessions. Some of the most engaging events are successful because they include fun activities. For instance, games like Industry Buzzword Bingo (which is exactly what it sounds like) keep attention levels and morale high. Another popular game is an internet scavenger hunt which not only encourages teamwork but gives a welcomed respite from the attentiveness expected at an internal event.
In addition to making your virtual meeting fun and engaging, you should look to make it immersive. Begin by mapping out the entire attendee journey from pre-event awareness to post-event follow-ups – and your teams will naturally receive like they’re receiving something. That something is value.
For the event itself, utilizing graphics, videos and other rich-media (use memes at your own risk), not only make for an immersive event, but offers it a certain ‘pop’ that helps bring virtual meetings to life.
Make Participation Simple
One of the best ways to align and engage your teams is by making your virtual meetings easier to participate in. This can be achieved in many ways. Consider planning for multiple time zones depending on how distributed your teams are, finding a balanced start time. Keep joining instructions simple. Have generic welcome messages at the ready when your audience joins. Give them a reason to talk. Don’t expect your audience to ‘just do it’. You have to ignite participation.
To bring your virtual meetings to life, you need to bring your virtual team to life in it. Focus on your audience experience first, and the rest will fall into place. Of course, you could also check out how Jugo helps do the hard yards for you…Request a demo now.
