Nine ways to keep your audience on the edge of their seats!
Anyone bringing people together — team managers, skilled facilitators, organizational change management consultants—should be thinking not just about the agenda and objectives, but also about engagement. When investing time to come together and meet, we owe it to each other to maximize the experience. So how do we keep people engaged, or better, yet, how do we keep people on the edge of their seats? We sat down with OCM consultant and certified facilitator, Tricia Conyers, to learn why meeting participants are often disengaged and how engagement can be improved in meetings, coaching sessions, workshops, and more.
Be intentional about meeting design
People are often disengaged in meetings due to lack of variation. Most meetings comply to a series of defaults. Defaults such as standard presentations followed by open discussions, meeting in the same conference room, at the same time, with the same agenda, and in the same format. With all of these defaults, people show up already bored and not ready to do their best thinking.
When designing and leading meetings, I focus on the desired experience we want to create. Participation, energy, environment, challenge—all contribute to an engaging experience. People stay engaged because I am intentional about designing the session. Having an agenda isn’t the same as having a design. An agenda is often a list of topics that we're going to review or perhaps questions to be addressed. A design for a session includes how you’ll lead people through the session, how you will create an environment that encourages people to explore new thinking, and how you will include variation to achieve the desired outcomes of the session. There are many elements or dimensions you can vary over the course of the session to keep the energy high, shift the energy lower, keep people challenged, and keep people thinking. We can shift people in and out of their comfort zone, work in different sized groups, or change the nature of the conversation, keeping interest high so that people never know what's next—keeping them on their toes! There's something about variation that helps people come up with better ideas, tap into more creativity, and commit to action because they've been part of shaping the outcome.
Meeting effectiveness and meeting engagement work together to create peak experiences. Yet most meeting owners only think about meeting effectiveness. You will get the best out of everyone’s time and create experiences where participants feel like they achieved something in a collaborative and inclusive environment when you focus on both. Meetings are a tipping point: the more that effectiveness and engagement are considered in meetings, the more that a collaborative and inclusive culture can be shaped where you are getting the best out of everybody rather than having meetings where everyone feels exhausted and drained.
Nine dimensions of engagement
So now that we are intentionally thinking about engagement, what the techniques that we can use to help achieve our meeting objective while getting the best from participants and creating a positive experience?
Group size. Alternate the group size from small to large, starting with people working alone and then gradually increase to people working in a large group.
Thinking structures. Vary thinking structures by asking people to think and process information using specific thinking formats. For example, people can work in thinking pairs or in a group think structure, such as a thinking circle.
Participant involvement. Shift participant involvement from unidirectional to multidirectional. For example, place participants in roles where they are being informed, consulted, or empowered.
Energy environment. Participants can be put in a calm, connected, or chaotic energy environment. An example of calm energy is having people silently reflect. Examples of chaotic energy include the use of speed timers or improv games to drive action.
Instruction complexity. Vary the complexity of instructions between tight and loose instructions. Layering instructions in piece by piece is a very controlled activity vs giving participants the freedom to navigate both the process and the output of an activity.
Challenge levels. Alter the challenge levels by having people use either existing knowledge and skills or new knowledge and skills in familiar or unknown situations. The different combination of these changes the challenge level.
Time and place. Adjusting the time and place has become more important as most of us have increased working virtually. Not everything has to be done at the same time or in the same place. Engagement can be created by giving people the option to work in different places at different times, or even different times and in the same place.
VARK modalities. VARK is an acronym for Visual, Auditory, Read (and write), and Kinetic. Vary between these modalities to keep participants engaged.
Season of Conversation. Consider what type of conversation you ask participants to have. Will people be in a conversation that is reflective and reconnective or will the conversation be intended to imagine or inspire ideas?
“I really look forward to coming to your meetings!”
In my early days as an OCMer, I remember working with department leaders to improve their team’s performance. The leader and I would sit down together and plan the meeting. Most weeks, we’d introduce a new concept to the team by starting with an energizer or connector. We’d also plan different activities to get people thinking about the topic at hand while keeping it relevant and engaging. I can remember people saying, “You know, I really look forward to coming to that meeting every week because we actually have some fun. We laugh together and we make progress on important issues.” We were purposeful in planning the meeting and introducing variation rather than a traditional meeting where people sit in their chairs and prepare to hear a monologue. It was about forming and deepening connections with others in the room, emphasizing their purpose as a team, and helping them think about issues relevant to their work in a thought-provoking way. As a result, they were inspired to solve problems and own opportunities in a way that was different to how they worked before.
Too often we default when it comes to meetings—we default to the same meeting times, rooms, topics, and process. This results in a lack of engagement. People feel frustrated and wonder why they were in the meeting if they weren’t there to contribute. As Organizational Change Management consultants, we can shake things up with intentional engagement by flexing and varying the nine dimensions of engagement—so that we can keep people on the edge of their seats, doing their best thinking and exciting them to take action!
Contact ChangeStaffing for support with keeping your meeting participants energized and engaged!
A very special thank you to Tricia Conyers for her thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog. Tricia offers a self-paced online course that explores the details of each of these nine dimensions of engagement and the options for how you can vary each one. If you are interested in enrolling in this course please reach out to Tricia at tricia.conyers@islandinspirations.co for a special discount.
Written by Kylette Harrison