Is engagement really that difficult?

It can be a challenge to attract and sustain peoples attention in any meeting, but is it really an enormous challenge in a virtual environment?  

I'm sure you'll remember the early days of Covid where many learning providers simply moved existing products online with no repurposing.

You will also remember facilitators who lacked lustre during delivery, reading from bullet list slides, prolonged introductions, failing to see those tell tale behaviours that signify early signs of withdrawal, and then reaching out to someone for an opinion whose camera is off only to hear "sorry I missed some of what you said" The individual was probably better engaged in washing a poodle.

We have all experienced that sinking feeling that comes from wanting to escape from this verbal diarrhea dump yet being too polite to do so. So we stay only to suffer more mental scaring when the host sends the video as a lasting memory.

I wonder how the fundamental rules of engagement escaped many, the basics that encourage the prisoners, passengers, protestors to voluntarily engage, to become participants. 

Over the past 8 months I've joined many webinars, this got me thinking about what it is that motivates me to join the events that I regularly engage with.

The Secret Sauce.....

We all have an innate need to be appreciated and recognition in some form fuels that intrinsic motivation. It could be as simple as "welcome thanks for joining" or an introduction to the group "this is joe, he has recently been promoted". Bev Holden introduced me recently "This is Joy she's one of our founder members", I felt appreciated.

Its not too difficult to set up joining instructions that enable you to discover information about participants and use that to make connections to drive collaboration.

Challenge. Providing tasks that people can actively engage in supported by meaningful goals. I've seen many breakout rooms fail because the goals or the structure of the task have lacked clarity. Assigning people to groups of 3 people increases the liklihood of of committment to meaningful involvement, and decreases the risk of individuals slipping into the passive observer role.

Curiosity pushes us to explore. We get curious when we encounter something new, surprising, or perplexing. Its surprisingly easy to generate a state of curiosity through  posing a question or a puzzle. Designing an activity involving a sequence of events where people speculate on what happens next. An online treasure hunt related to the topic for each breakout group. This can also involve an element of competition which is a source of motivation through challenge which increases the importance we place on doing well.

Mixed media. If your goal is engagement then there is nothing more disengaging than being constantly bombarded with static linear slides. We are visual creatures. Images grab our attention easily, we are immediately drawn to them and it takes a lot longer to read and digest a series of long sentences than it does to analyse a visual scene. That's why infographics are so effective in learning.

Appeal to the senses include movement, design interactive board games incorporate video or sound bites, mixed media provides pace and energy which drives engagement.