
Attending a virtual meeting, but disengaged. The computer is logged in and engaged, but the attendee is reading a book, disengaged.
Keeping attendees engaged in virtual meetings is inherently valuable. But it also reduces the need for techniques to re-engage attendees after they "check out" or become distracted. Engagement prevents many other problems, such as inattentiveness, distractedness, poor decision making, and the need to repeat what's just been said.
Here's Part II of a set of techniques for keeping attendees engaged.
- Solicit agenda items from attendees in advance
- Some meeting chairs distribute agendas for their meetings without first soliciting suggestions from attendees. In effect, they're imposing an agenda on the meeting.
- Even when the agenda is obvious, soliciting suggestions in advance enhances attendee engagement. Attendees who suggest items tend to feel an affinity for the items they suggested, which can enhance their sense of engagement.
- Publish a "Not Agenda" in advance
- Items on the Not Agenda are off limits for the meeting. They're less likely to arise during the meeting, less likely to be appended to the parking lot, and less likely to waste valuable meeting time.
- Including the Not Agenda along with a solicitation of agenda items keeps attendees from suggesting items that are known in advance not to be agenda items for the meeting.
- Track who is actually present
- If you don't know who's present, it's Even when the agenda is obvious,
soliciting suggestions in advance
enhances attendee engagementdifficult to keep them engaged. Ask people to "check in" when they arrive, or when they return from breaks or from stepping out. Ask that they announce their departures if they must step out during the meeting. This custom lets everyone know who is present, which can be important for conducting discussions. - But it can require a bit of bookkeeping. For meetings of more than a few people, designate an "attendance scribe" who tracks this information, and posts it on screen in a manner visible to everyone. Two columns work well: Present and Not Present. When people know that everyone else is aware that they're present, they're less inclined to succumb to distractions, because they realize that anyone might address them directly at any time.
- Don't maintain a queue of people who want to speak — use rotation
- The speaker queue is widely used for allocating speaking time. Whether executed by catching the facilitator's eye in face-to-face meetings, or by technological "hand-raise" tools in virtual meetings, speaker queues have limitations. They tend to scramble discussion threads, especially for complicated or controversial topics. And the queue can get very long indeed.
- Rotation addresses both issues. Using Rotation, the facilitator asks each attendee, in turn, for a contribution, perhaps in the order of the "Present" list (see above). Attendees who have no contribution say, "Pass." The facilitator repeats the poll until a round completes with everyone passing. Rotation has the added benefit of providing a natural reason for the facilitator to ask each attendee for a contribution, without the risks attendant with singling out individuals.
Most important, don't meet unnecessarily. Taking up people's time for no good reason leads to disengagement that can't be overcome by even the most powerful techniques. First issue in this series
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Are your virtual meetings plagued by inattentiveness, interruptions, absenteeism, and a seemingly endless need to repeat what somebody just said? Do you have trouble finding a time when everyone can meet? Do people seem disengaged and apathetic? Or do you have violent clashes and a plague of virtual bullying? Read Leading Virtual Meetings for Real Results to learn how to make virtual meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot shorter. Order Now!
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Related articles
More articles on Virtual and Global Teams:
Costs of the Catch-Me-Up Antipattern: I
- Your meetings start on time, but some people are habitually late. When they arrive, they ask, "What
did I miss? Catch me up." This is an expensive way to do business. How expensive is it?
Virtual Teams Need Generous Travel Budgets
- Although virtual team members who happen to be co-located do meet from time to time, meetings of people
who reside at different sites are often severely restricted by tight or nonexistent travel budgets.
Such restrictions, intended to save money, can contribute to expensive delays and errors.
Polychronic Meetings
- In very dynamic contexts, with multiple issues to address, we probably cannot rely on the usual format
of single-threaded meeting with a list of agenda items to be addressed each in their turn. A more flexible,
issue-driven format might work better.
Disjoint Awareness: Systematics
- Organizations use some policies and processes that can cause people in collaborations to have inaccurate
understandings of what each other is doing. Performance management, politics, and resource allocation
processes can all contribute to disjoint awareness.
The Six Dimensions of Online Disinhibition: I
- The online environment has properties that cause us to relax the inhibitions that keep us civil. And
that leads to an elevated incidence of toxic conflict in public cyberspace. But workplace cyberspace
is different. There is reason for optimism there.
See also Virtual and Global Teams and Virtual and Global Teams for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming April 2: Mitigating the Trauma of Being Laid Off
- Trauma is an emotional response to horrible events — accidents, crimes, disasters, physical abuse, emotional abuse, gross injustices — and layoffs. Layoff trauma is real. Employers know how to execute layoffs with compassion, but some act out of cruelty. Know how to defend yourself. Available here and by RSS on April 2.
And on April 9: Defining Workplace Bullying
- When we set out to control the incidence of workplace bullying, problem number one is defining bullying behavior. We know much more about bullying in children than we do about adult bullying, and more about adult bullying than we know about workplace bullying. Available here and by RSS on April 9.
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