3 Ways To Involve People In Virtual Meetings

It is pretty hard to stay focused and attentive in a world full of devices and unnecessary distractions. Furthermore, it is challenging to force people to pay attention to both online meetings and real-life ones. But still, online meetings remain one of the most complex situations when you are helpless to do anything about it when you are speaking to people who are not even in the same room. And the most irritating thing is when you talk about something with the arguments, then pause for reaction, and you heard that he did not understand and get the idea you were talking about for five long minutes just because he did not expect to be called on.

Let’s face the truth; lots of video conferences have never been of high concentration enough. There is no participant feeling responsible for engaging. We know that we are all familiar with the situation when there are a meeting and plenty of participants, and we redress responsibility for engagement with eye contact. When someone takes a look at us, we get an obligation to fake interest. When you can’t claim attention with judgmental eyes, you need to create voluntary involvement.

Usually, online meetings are held because of four main reasons: to make advantageous decisions, to solve troubles or misunderstandings, to boost relationships, and to influence other participants. As you see, all these actions are active; it turns out that passive participants cannot perform quality work.

Based on studies conducted in the last several years, there have been found out three proven rules to follow if you want to get better online meeting outcomes.

Responsibility

When you are in the social environment, you work to find out your role, and it is okay. For example, when you enter an opera theater, you unconsciously know your role as a watcher and perform it. When you go to the market, you are a doer, and you are here to buy products. The main threat in online meetings is when its participants take the watcher. And there is a solution to nip these issues in the bud. You need to create an experience of team responsibility. If you directly say to them, “I want all of you to be involved,” that’s probably doesn’t work. Instead of that, just let them take meaningful responsibility. You can learn how to do that in the next point.

Stick To One Minute Rule

Remember, people will never be genuinely engaged in problem-solving if they can’t feel the problem. The rule of one minute is to tell or do something to engage participants. There is much advice on how to start your article or international meeting, so your audience listened attentively to what you’re going to say. The rules to help them wake up and listen to you are to tell people something shocking, provocative, dramatizing, or funny. For example, you can show competitor’s statistics that can plunge all participants into shock and make them feel inferior or share a story about some company where a regular customer stops buying because the company’s staff can’t offer the right price and maintenance.

You can use any tactic or strategy, but you should always make sure that your team have got into the problem raised at the meeting.

Nowhere To Run

A lot of studies have shown that if something happens in the crowd, there is no responsibility at all. That means if everybody is responsible, then no one feels responsible. Remember this rule and try to avoid such a situation when holding a meeting. For this purpose, create a task, separate people to groups, give them a messaging platform or any online meeting software or online meeting service, and let them solve the problem within the task. Give people time constraints to get them done something, and you will see how effectively this rule work.