Fighting Zoom fatigue with engaging virtual meetings

Does this sound like your typical Zoom/Teams meeting: Have most participants turned off their cameras? Do you hear a deafening silence when you ask your audience a question? Is the chat quiet, except for someone asking for the slides?

Back in April 2020, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy of the Harvard Business Review outlined a definition of Zoom fatigue*, and how we can mitigate it. Video conferencing can leave people feeling drained and less active than usual. Yet, the recipe for higher engagement in your online meetings and conferences is often found in their design.

Here are some suggestions to shake up your meeting routine and reconnect with your virtual audience:

Setting the stage

The first 5 minutes of your meeting are crucial to set the right tone and level of engagement you are hoping for. As soon as people connect, build interaction by welcoming them, ask something small of them, such as introducing themselves in the chat and let them know what kind of presence and participation you are hoping for (videos on, mics off). If you are planning to send them into breakout rooms for small group exercises at some point, let them know, so that they can anticipate an upcoming presence on camera.

If appropriate, invite participants to share something in the chat: Where they are connecting from, what they had for lunch, what their hobbies are... The objective is to start a conversation and set the mood for an interactive experience.

Do not underestimate your participants' appetite for interaction, even though they may be used to a more passive experience. I once asked my European Commission training participants to describe what was happening outside their window as if it were the first sentence of a novel, and we were all very pleasantly surprised by the creative and poetic responses in the chat.

Energisers... with a purpose

Keep the sharing energy going with an icebreaker exercise, a quick poll, or word cloud relevant to the session topic. When possible, plan an exercise that helps establish a joint expectation for the meeting, a bonding experience, and/or a positive outlook for this time online together.

The aim here is to give your attendees a shared sense of ownership for an effective online session. Here are some suggestions from our friends at SessionLab and Slido, respectively.

For a more formal wordcloud exercise there are options such as asking 'In one word, how would you describe this project?' or proposing a much less formal hunt for the cat GIF that best embodies the current state of affairs. There are many ways to ease your participants into a sharing mood.

Icebreakers can help a group become more at ease with one another and bond faster, while energisers can shift an afternoon slump to a more vibrant tone. My favourite energiser game of 2020 was a virtual scavenger hunt organised for the Civitates grantees. In it, I asked teams of participants to recreate famous paintings with household items, using a mixed media of real-time pictures, house pets and online resources.

Modifying your content

Keep presentations short, change the format every 20 minutes, and establish bio breaks every 90 minutes or less. If needed, prerecord long presentations in advance, and share the video ahead of time.

If you do not want your audience to switch to movie-mode, give them a chance to use your time together to contribute, exchange, discuss, question, explain and debate, instead of only passively receiving information.

Gary Genard, author of "The Online Meetings Handbook", and creator of the public speaking training Genard Method, suggests to give information to participants in bite-sized pieces, in order to retain their attention.

As you offer one hearty 'bite' of content per segment, allow your participants to 'chew' and 'digest' the point you're making before you move on to the next stage of your presentation or workshop. This way, you help your participants keep pace with you and the information you are presenting, while boosting everyone's ability to retain key points*.

These are only a few suggestions for creating a more interactive experience for your attendees. Each helps generate a particular meeting energy where participants feel welcome and where their contributions and time are valued.

This article was originally published on WordWorks. WordWorks helps managers, academics and performers communicate brilliantly in live and remote presentations, For more tips, follow us on LinkedIn 

* How to Combat Zoom Fatigue by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, Harvard Business Review, April 29, 2020

* Genard, G. (2020). The Online Meetings Handbook, Cedar and Maitland Press