4 ways to make online meetings more engaging

With hybrid and remote work becoming the norm, online company meetings are something that has become a part of our everyday work lives. But screen fatigue is real, and when employees look at their calendars to see a full day of back-to-back online meetings, it’s understandable why it can be hard to muster enthusiasm or active participation for each one.

While it’s hard to replicate the interaction and spontaneous conversations of in-person meetings in the online world, there are ways to encourage engagement and tap into the tech tools that can make online meetings more productive and efficient than in-person.

Read more: What you’re overlooking in managing your company’s hybrid remote policy

Based on our lessons learned as a fully remote company spanning different continents, and also a technology provider for virtual meetings and events, we can offer some best practices to make online company meetings less of a snooze and more of a success.

1. Cameras on, distractions off. The pandemic got us used to online conference calls, but many of us still shied away from turning on our cameras. Make it a company policy to keep cameras on during business meetings. It’s too tempting to start “multitasking” if you know people can’t see what you’re doing — whether that be reading emails, texts, looking at Slack, or checking out YouTube videos and social media feeds. Make sure everyone keeps their camera on and ask them to mute devices; if it were an in-person meeting you would not allow people to be distracted by their computers or phones, so make it clear you need that same level of attention from everyone. That being said, for an internal meeting you don’t have to recreate an office setting at all costs, so colleagues shouldn’t stress about what they’re wearing or if there’s a pet wandering around in the background; you can have a great productive meeting with cameras on without making it overly formal.

2. Don’t overschedule. It’s tempting when meetings are online to squeeze in as many as possible in a day or a week — people aren’t traveling or commuting to work, so schedules may be more open and it may be easier to cram in more meetings than before on the calendar across teams. However, your staff will burn out quickly if they are just in meetings all day long. Be sensitive to the fact that people need lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, and the ability to stretch their legs, just as they would if they were at the office. Look over the agenda for your meeting in advance and decide if the meeting is truly needed or if it can simply be handled in an email with the team. Your team will appreciate the time back in their day and be more prepared and engaged at your next online meeting.

3. Prepare an airtight agenda. Just winging it in an online meeting is never a good idea. It’s far too easy to lose people’s attention when they’re not sitting in front of you if you don’t have a well-planned, organized set list of items to cover. For smaller team meetings, we recommend assigning a chief meeting officer who owns the agenda from A to Z and runs the entire meeting, and then rotating that position regularly. This way everyone gets a chance to run a meeting and prepare items and is charged with keeping things on track.  

One way to structure an online meeting is to have the smaller talks at the start for the first five minutes or so. These could be ice breakers, if there are new members to your team, or just an informal way to get everyone chatting before the core of the agenda begins. Sometimes it’s as simple as the chief meeting officer asking people to share their favorite movie or TV show they’re binging, or favorite book they’ve read recently or recipe they’ve tried. Once you get to the heart of the meeting, make sure the chief meeting officer has planned in advance calling on people to participate so it’s not a one-way street of lectures, which can be hard to stay tuned into. At the end of each meeting should be a recap and clear to do’s as well as a period for questions — whether people are chiming in with them on video or entering them into a chat box. We’ve also found having something fun planned at the end of the meeting is a great way to keep people engaged all the way to the end. We’ve had people share one fun fact about themselves in advance with the chief meeting officer and then everyone has to guess who it is like a trivia game, or even asked people to share their baby pictures and everyone has to guess the employee.

4. Take advantage of the online medium. While there are things that are hard to replicate from in-person meetings, the reverse is also true, and hosting meetings online through a full featured video engagement platform will allow your team to interact with one another online in a way they could not do in person. On a more whimsical side, you can ask your team to find backgrounds that tie into the theme of the meeting and you can also encourage them to utilize emojis — like hands raised or clapping — to congratulate a colleague or share instant feedback on something they enjoyed. We’ve also successfully pulled in online tools like Miro to whiteboard ideas all together during our meetings or Figma to share flow charts and diagrams with one another during breakout sessions. We’ve also used Notion and Google Suite together to organize tasks and files during webinars and internal meetings. Prepare ahead of time what online tools you want to use during a specific session to make sure people are ready to open these apps and engage. Very brief online polls immediately following meetings are a great way to get feedback about topics covered during the meeting or even the format of the meeting itself so you can continue to find ways to make these sessions both more efficient and engaging. The ability to record these online meetings is also important as you can have people who are out view them later or point to different sections to have your team review when they need reminders of action items, collaborations, or presentations from the live session. Just make sure the company is using a video engagement platform that can support integration of all of these collaborative online meeting tools.

Online meetings don’t have to mean naptime or distracted listening, but they do take some creativity and planning as well as research of the online tools at your disposal. Keeping your colleagues engaged, interactive and accountable at meetings means you show up well-prepared with a brief agenda, engaging online tools and some banter, and they attend with cameras on, devices off and a willingness to participate. Even if and when we return to in-person work, I think we’ll find that sometimes online meetings will be a better way to keep these team sessions efficient, informative, interactive and enjoyable.