Most meetings weren’t engaging to begin with.
Zoom just exposed us to the truth.
Check out this passage from the Harvard Business Review, authored by Justin Hale and Joseph Grenny:
“Let’s face it, most meetings have always sucked because there’s often little to zero accountability for engagement. When we are together in a room, we often compensate with coercive eye contact. Participants feel some obligation to feign interest (even if they’re staring at their phones). In situations where you can’t demand attention with ocular oppression, you have to learn to do what we should’ve mastered long ago: create voluntary engagement. In other words, you have to create structured opportunities for attendees to engage fully.”
I love this.
We didn’t lose engagement when we went remote.
We just lost the ability to fake it.
If you’re leading meetings in ANY setting, it isn’t about managing attention.
It’s about earning it.
You want to structure moments that make people want to lean in.
If you want five specific ways to do that, here’s a link to their article:
👉 How to Get People to Actually Participate in Virtual Meetings
What’s one thing you’ve seen that actually made a meeting engaging?
(A big thanks to Nhan for sharing this article with me when Zoom started taking off).