4 Strategies To Make Your Online Meetings More Dynamic

The ongoing pandemic has forced many companies to consider having their employees work from home. This means that a significant amount of time is used on meetings through video conferences. According to the way things are going, this reality will take a while before it’s entirely dealt with. Hence, it is crucial to make your online meetings more engaging and dynamic.

What will be your next course of action when you realize that your virtual staff meetings are continuously mechanical, monotonous, and non-productive? What strategies do you have in mind to change these meetings to be livelier and create an experience that your colleagues can value and embrace?

Here are four tips to make your next virtual meeting engaging and worth boasting about.

Stay Human

The pandemic calls for physical distancing, not social distancing. It is essential to remain socially connected to operate generally as humans.

Commence your virtual meeting by checking on your colleagues. Some of them might be going through a rough time with homeschooling while continually monitoring their children. Assist them in getting acquainted with the meeting’s purpose and set aside a few minutes to inquire on how folks are doing.

Allow colleagues to share funny experiences that transpired during the day or a funny meme. You can use this time to nurture your humanity and be in touch with colleagues. Once your workmates sense that you care and are willing to listen and understand them through the new environment, you will gain more attention and respect.

Come Up With More Engaging Questions

Try to develop some queries that do not have straight yes/no, right/wrong answers, and avoid questions that ask for negative or critical responses. When you ask questions conversationally, the meeting develops a natural flow and significant spontaneity. The exchange becomes more interesting, lively, and engaging.

Authentic and deep conversations, controlled by a skilled facilitator, help explore issues, solutions, and strategies to move forward. They enable the meeting to go beyond the tedious list of agenda topics and create a dialogue that evolves into a more democratic debate that is less hierarchical. The goal is to develop and guide an engaging conversation that most participants can constructively contribute to and also benefit from.

Seek Personalized Service And Support

Many businesses are not the same. Therefore, there isn’t a single solution capable of solving all challenges in business communications. Personalized service support closely works with you to identify precisely what your business requires after evaluating how your business operates. Connex is an excellent example of an independent company that can handle your communication needs. The company has top-notch operation centers. It is also flexible for hand-picking collaborators to provide better technology and solutions that can be easily adapted to your needs.

Services offered by communication experts include day-to-day audio conferencing, reserved audio conferencing, and Video & web conferencing.

Focus on the Positive

Employees mostly know and understand their colleagues better. When a manager or a client isn’t featured in the virtual meeting, some individuals may take this as an opportunity to allow themselves to become unprofessional and harmful. Some managers may view this as an excellent way to allow employees to let out their frustrations. However, once negativity begins to surface, more negativity and non-professionalism will follow, potentially making the meeting uncontrollable.

According to Tony Golsby-Smith from Harvard Business Review, when real issues are left unaddressed, they criticize and nit-pick instead. When this happens, imagination is suffocated, and participants no longer see the bigger picture. Consequently, this ends up risking the whole organizations’ existence. Suppose group members begin showing some signs of negativity. In that case, you should try and express understanding (without agreeing), slowly introduce boundaries of professional conversation, and cautiously steer participants away from negative remarks.

Online meetings have the potential to be even better than in-person meetings in many ways. Discussing with participants regarding the direction you want the session to go and setting general expectations on a few guidelines as you begin your online meeting can considerably improve everybody’s experience.

Suggestions mentioned above and more, if sufficiently implemented, can potentially take your virtual meetings to the next level. Participants can look forward to the sessions with excitement, openness to creative ideas, and a strong desire to contribute to the meeting.