WebRTC Expert Feature

May 06, 2020

How to Make Business Meetings Interactive




You can make virtual meetings productive and engaging. Using mobile video conferencing is an effective and inexpensive way to meet with your employees or clients. It saves in travel costs, as well as, and you can schedule meetings quickly, it does not take months of planning.

Video conferencing helps build engagement, trust, and unity among your team, and it is easy to schedule with your team because they can use their smartphones. You can make your video conferencing calls interactive and engaging by making those involved feel like they a part of something.

Read on for tips to make your business meetings more interactive.

Before the Meeting

You need to do some pre-work to prepare your meeting so that participants can take full advantage of the meeting by thinking about content, and ideas to present beforehand.

  • Turn video on – since you are doing a virtual meeting, everyone on the call is separated, so the best thing you can do during a session turns the video on so everyone can feel connected. Videos are more engaging and interactive because you can see peoples faces and reactions.

  • Remove Reports – it is a waste of time and opportunity to have people just read reports off a piece of paper. To combat this, send out a simple plan before the meeting that points on essential items and only spend time on certain things if people have questions or a comment.

  • Be Prepared for Opinions - when the schedule has gone out, make sure to discuss what needs to cover during the meeting. Get input from team needs ahead of time so that you are representing the best information in the conference, and people can voice their opinions.

During the Meeting

During the meeting, you want to make sure that you are connecting people so that they are comfortable with each other. This helps with increasing participants interest and interaction. To have a productive meeting, you want people to connect and feel comfortable in the meeting environment.

  • Encourage Collective Problem Solving – having a joint meeting to problem solve can help with keeping everyone in the meeting engaged and interactive. Bring forward a topic and encourage constructive conversation to solves problems and generate fresh ideas.

  • Allot Each Person Time on the Agenda – make sure to give everyone attending the meeting time to speak. When everyone has a chance to collaborate during the meeting, they will still be engaged in the conversation happening.

  • Discourage Multitasking – make sure your employees are solely focused on their meeting and not multitasking. Ways to discourage multitasking is by:
    • Use video. By using video, you can see if anyone is not paying attention
    • Asking participants to share their thoughts, so that they need to be paying attention
    • Share different tasks with people to do in the meeting. Ask a teammate to take minutes, etc.

After the Meeting

Leave five to 10 minutes after the meeting ends to air out any issues in the video meeting. This leaves out the “water cooler” talk and lets everyone have an equal chance to be transparent and air out any grievances.

Go around and ask the participants what they would have done differently in the meeting. This is the time for people to speak or hold their peace. They can say what they disagreed with, what they are concerned about, and what they did not like or would maybe do differently.

Final Thoughts

Meeting is essential to running a successful business. To have productive meetings virtually, you need to make sure people are engaged. People are most engaged when they feel like they a part of something, and their ideas are considered.

When meetings involve just talking a participant, you lose audience participation. It is essential to include everyone in your session and try using video conferencing that allows everyone to see each other and interact.



Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]




FOLLOW US

Free WebRTC eNewsletter

Sign up now to recieve your free WebRTC eNewsletter for all up to date news and conference details. Its free! what are you waiting for.