How to Encourage Employee Participation in Meetings
Meetings are a great tool for team-building and decision making, fostering creativity and guiding teams toward success. Most office meetings are conducted to communicate direction, recognise achievements, inform of changes and discuss operational strategies with teams. They also hold immense value in collectively sharing ideas for an organisation’s growth and discussing problems and potential solutions.
However, it is often observed that employees tend to avoid participation in meetings. This reluctance could be due to factors such as fear of judgment, lack of confidence, previous negative experiences, or a lack of psychological safety. For instance, an individual may always be choosing to remain silent for fear of being dismissed or ridiculed. Research shows that 9 out of 10 people daydream in meetings, 50% consider meetings to be unproductive, 25% of meeting time is wasted on irrelevant topics, and 75% of leaders lack formal training on conducting an effective meeting.
Fortunately, the solutions to these challenges are pretty simple. Let us look at some of them:
Encourage equal participation
For every organisation to succeed in today’s competitive world, diversity is extremely important. Equally important is ensuring that every employee should have a chance to contribute and be heard. This means that the facilitator must ensure hearing from all the members, not just from the outspoken. When a variety of people share their perspectives, it leads to the best decisions possible. To foster equal participation, the facilitator needs to be mindful of power dynamics in the room. If someone dominates the dialogue, the conversation must be redirected back to the broader group. People should remain open to voice their opinions, and should not feel the pressure to agree to conformity bias during the meeting. Conformity bias refers to the tendency to want to fit into the group, even if that means overlooking your own ideas and opinions.
Show that employee opinion is valued
It is vital to demonstrate to your team members that you value them and their contributions. For this, a culture of support is required. One such way is by demonstrating empathy and actively engaging all the team members in problem-solving. You can celebrate team members who exemplify these behaviours.
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Remind the team that every perspective enriches the discussion, which makes the team more productive. You could say, “As you know the topic for today’s discussion is customer feedback, so we’d love to hear your insights and questions.”
Facilitating conversation through questions
To encourage inclusive dialogue, ask open-ended questions that invite meaningful responses and expand the conversation. So, instead of asking a yes-or-no question, try, “What do you think are the best and worst parts of our recent sales performance, and why?”
Open-ended questions are designed to encourage team members to involve in an open dialogue with no imposition of a predefined agenda. Such questions often start with “Why?” “How?” and “What?” The key role of the facilitator is to get people communicating and making them feel at ease while sharing ideas.
Here are some questions that could spark engaging conversations.
- Can you tell me more?
- Why do you think that’s happening?
- What am I missing?
- If you had the freedom to change anything, what would you change?
- How does the team feel? How does the team want to feel?
- What’s moving us backward? Why?
These strategies, if implemented, allow you to create a meeting environment that encourages participation, fosters collaboration, and drives success.