4 Ways to Have Your Audience Participate in Your Online Meeting (Atomic Essay 6)

Have you seen the poster from Somee Cards (https://www.someecards.com/) that says: "This two hour meeting was as productive as a long email"? I know you have been there, an online meeting, that could have been a video recording because you were only there as captive audience of a boring content, and while your head in your video was required, your brain was actually not needed.

In order to engage our audience, first we need to identify why they should join a meeting in the first place. What kinds of contributions they have? And are there any parts of the meeting they are not needed? For instance, in my meeting with academic program directors, I have broken up the meeting into two or three parts after realizing this group worked like a Venn Diagram, the middle parts interested all, and the beginning could have half of the group focused on graduate programs and the last part would have the undergraduate programs, so the audience showed up when it was relevant to them. After ensuring that everyone that is in the meeting would have important contributions, you can implement these four strategies to ensure you pick their brains:

• Tactic #1: Bring up problems requiring solutions or needs requiring a response to the table. People love to know they can actually help a system get better.
• Tactic #2: Ask open-ended questions that require more than yes/no answers and implement small group discussions or break out rooms for a more intimate setting. This will help your more quite participants to jump in during the small group setting.
• Tactic #3: Use polls or surveys to give learners a voice without the pressure. Zoom has the poll feature in the paid subscription and I love it. Another tool I like to build in polls into slide decks is Slido. Additionally, you can have people brainstorm together on a google doc and add ideas together without waiting for each person's turn.
• Tactic #4: Use multimedia content, statistics, or stories to trigger more thoughtful responses.

These tactics will help you get full participation and communicate to your audience that their presence and participation are really needed for your meeting. What other strategies are you implementing?