Plan More, Talk Less – A Technique for More Effective Virtual Meetings
Loriana Sekarski
Loriana Sekarski is the founder and president of BONSAI, a consulting company that transforms leaders (and businesses) into the best version of themselves. Outside of BONSAI, Loriana serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University's graduate student program. Additionally, she's fine-tuning her passion project, TakeFlight, a program that addresses domestic abuse within the Christian community.
Have you ever walked away from a one-hour webinar completely exhausted? Maybe it’s just me, but hearing someone drone on for an hour in a virtual meeting is often a painful experience (especially when you know work is piling up during the call).
It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve also been on much longer video calls that weren’t exhausting because of how they were planned and led. As with in-person meetings, it all comes back to preparation and engagement.
I recently led a five-hour corporate team summit virtually. Honestly, the very idea scared me a bit, and as the date approached, I had lots of thoughts swirling in my head. How can I make this interesting? Will they participate? What will be of interest? I was told they would need breaks every hour for emailing and checking phones. If that’s the case, how will I ever keep their attention?
I knew the attendees had packed schedules and extraordinary demands on their time, and I wanted the experience to be a valuable use of their time. The result was a five-hour meeting where 20 people were fully engaged!
To prepare for the team summit, I thought back to strategies I’ve previously used for meetings that spanned several hours. While those were in-person meetings, the strategies can be applied to virtual meetings as well. It takes much more preparation time because planning engagement is a lot more work than creating a PowerPoint and talking through the slides. This is a formula that works, and I want to share it with you.
Bottom line—you need to distill the key takeaways and find creative ways to engage participants in the learning process.
Clarify the Objectives
You may like to think they will remember everything you say, but let’s get real—they won’t. I know I don’t remember everything from long meetings. You have to clarify the objectives to improve retention instead of trying to cover everything. Identify the three to five key objectives that will make it a successful meeting from the participant’s perspective. What do they want and/or need to walk away with?
Use Breakouts Heavily
Talking with four or five people in a small group is much more interesting than hearing only one person speak. People discover truths and learn better this way. This also builds relationships as people get to know each other. Give them meaningful problems and send them off to be creative!
Be strategic in how you assign your groups though. Sometimes I use cross-functional groups, other times I ensure I don’t mix managers with employees, and other times I just do a random selection. Think carefully about group composition. Sometimes continuity is important from one breakout to the next, and other times you may want to mix up the groups with each different breakout.
"I had lots of thoughts swirling in my head. How can I make this interesting? Will they participate? What will be of interest?"
Use Zoom Polls
Using polls during the virtual meeting is an effective way to do an emotional check-in with attendees. If you find a third of the people are distracted and emotionally depleted, you’ll need to adjust how you’re running the meeting compared to a poll that says all attendees are 100% ready to go. Polls also make the meeting more interesting by breaking things up, allowing for a different type of activity, and helping people see how results compare to their own thoughts. Polls are also a great way to prioritize topics before setting breakout meeting agendas. I encourage humor in how you articulate the choices! Have some fun with it.
Bring in Guest Speakers
Would late-night talk shows be as interesting without the host doing an interview? What if the guest just sat and spoke? I don’t think Carson or Letterman or Kimmel would have lasted decades without the conversational format. So even if you know the material, find a guest speaker and interview them. This prevents both you and your guest from launching into a boring monologue!
Create some basic structure around the interview and ask that the guest limit each answer to no more than three minutes. I also suggest a total interview of 15 to 20 minutes with some time for participant questions at the end. That way they are hearing other voices, not just yours! Rather than taking questions from the chat window and asking them yourself, invite participants to unmute to ask their questions live.
Follow a Set Agenda and Script
When I say follow a script, I don’t mean read every word verbatim for the entire day. But you do need some clear structure to keep things on track and enough notes to be sure you’re communicating well with participants about breaks, breakout sessions, and other details. I had every detail of the meeting written out so we clearly knew when things were going to happen, including:
- When are breaks scheduled?
- Who is in each breakout and how long do they have to discuss?
- When will I have time to compose the manual breakout rooms? (Typically during a five-minute break.)
- What is on my screen share if using any PowerPoint? (This is a good idea for questions given to the breakout group.)
- What polls are happening and when?
This detailed structure of the meeting helps ensure you have enough time. When I wrote out everything for the five-hour meeting, I found I had six hours of activity initially and had to start condensing it. I also recommend doing a practice run through the script with someone else to help catch any errors.
Be Flexible
Some of the best development and learning come from shifting your approach or content to where your audience wants to go. For example, if you discover a major obstacle to your leaders holding their people accountable, that is a topic you want to drill down on, even if you have to remove other content. I always have a game plan, but I hold it loosely. I find God guides me on where I need to take them.
Have Fun
Finally, if you aren’t having fun doing this, how can they possibly have fun listening? You need to bring energy, or you will drain whatever energy there is in your audience.
With these considerations in mind and plenty of planning, you can have engaging virtual meetings that leave people energized and excited rather than exhausted. These same strategies help make in-person meetings more engaging as well. It might take some time for you to learn and adjust to a new approach, but the result will be well worth the time you invest in the process and the planning.
