Six quick and simple tools to maintain engagement
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Micro-polls are a means to replace the murmurs and gestures that are often suppressed within meetings as a result of muting and poor visibility of videos.
How does it work
Keeping everyone fully engaged in a meeting has always been a challenge. With the sudden increase in home-working and the use of tools like Zoom and Teams, engagement in meetings has both become more important, and more difficult.
Engagement is key to ensuring the best answers and building commitment to them. It is also a big factor in maintaining relationships, developing trust, staff satisfaction, and also for retention. And during the current crisis, it is all the more important that people feel they are still part of a team.
But in most virtual meetings, it can be difficult to see whether people are engaged or not, and this can be a challenge in using the things you used to use to ensure individuals at risk of disengagement were drawn in to the discussion.
The differences between the physical and the virtual meeting environment mean that we have lost a lot. But the differences also mean that we have gained a lot that many of us have not yet tapped into. For example, simple, quick and easy ways to engage people and to keep that engagement going.
In this short article, we will not only introduce some of these, we will also provide you with a free instant resource to use them in all your future meetings. You can get your own copy here – it contains all of the tools below. All of these tools are in the form of micro-polls – simple checks that should take no more than 5 seconds to do. It is not the whole answer, but it is a good start, and when you are ready to build on that, we have a whole host of other engagement resources available for you.
Yes / No Check
A common way to engage people in meetings is to ask a question like ‘Any questions so far?’, or ‘Is this making sense to you?’. In a physical meeting, this would attract a response of simple nods or shakes, and muttered ‘yeps’ or ‘nopes’. You would scan the room as you asked the question, and immediately spot any ‘nil’ responses and gently call them out … ‘Andrea, Jack ???’
However, in virtual meetings, people are often on mute, and some webcams are not showing, and the most common response tends to be silence, which is accepted as the default answer. But it gives you no idea of who didn’t respond because they are okay, and who didn’t respond because they are becoming disengaged.
The Yes / No Check uses a simple whiteboard panel to get people to move their cursors over yes or no in response to the question. Cursors that are left in the ‘wrong’ place are clearly identifiable – Andrea and Jack – and this enables you to follow up.
Alternating ‘Any questions so far?’ and ‘Is this making sense to you?’ has the effect of changing the default answer, and helps to keep people on their toes (i.e. ‘engaged’)
Status Tracker
The status tracker is a tool that enables real-time feedback on presentations regarding agreement, speed, queries etc. In theory we could track this through watching people’s faces, but that is not always possible, and furthermore presenting in a virtual environment can be more complex, and take more of our attention away from the audience.
Simply ask people to place their cursors on ‘okay’, and move them if they wish to raise a question, suggest a change of pace, or provide encouragement. You can intersperse this with the Yes/No Check above to ensure that those on ‘okay’ have not fallen asleep.
Mood Indicator
This can be used at the end of any particular section of the agenda to take a quick poll of how people feel the meeting is going. It gives an opportunity for people to either indicate their support of the conclusions so far, or to flag up that they have concerns, which can then be addressed.
Straw Poll
Web conferencing tools often have polling tools included within them. However, they are not much used, partly because of the (organisational) practicalities involved in setting them up. An alternative is for presenters to include polls within their slide deck where each answer is associated with a different number or colour.
The Straw Poll is simply a panel with those numbers and colours positioned so that people can quickly indicate their answer by placing their cursor on the panel. In this way, people can both engage, and can contribute quickly and easily to an emerging picture.
Meeting Check-in
The Meeting Check-in is an easy way of getting basic participation right from the start of your meeting. Simply ask people to place their cursor over the emoticon that most closely represents how they are feeling on arrival at this meeting. You can then get people to talk about this in the same way that you would in a normal check-in. This can be really helpful to people who are feeling distanced from their colleagues as a result of more homeworking.
Readiness Check-in
One of the biggest causes of inefficiency in meetings turns out to be people’s preparation before attending the meeting – not completing actions or doing the pre-reading. Furthermore, its effects are insidious – when it happens, you need to compensate, and this makes it more likely that people will rely on that compensation next time around.
The Readiness Check-in is simply about making this issue transparent. People place their cursors on the Venn Diagram according to what they have done in preparation.
With many people, making readiness visible from the outset is often all that is required for them to self-correct. And for others, correction can be influenced by gentle off-line discussions. The action of simply making it visible and important is often enough to get it fixed. And if it isn’t, then the picture can be used as the basis of a general discussion of its implications, and a team contract on ‘how we want to be’ going forward.
The more prepared people are, the more likely that they will use that knowledge and insight to participate.
Other tools
The simple tools above will help you increase participation and engagement. However, they are only scratching the surface of what is possible, and if they are used in isolation for a prolonged period of time, there is a danger that they may become clichéd and irrelevant. Participation is more than simply using a cursor as a flag, and the same technology which enables all of the above has much greater potential to engage people’s ideas, collaboration and commitment.
Two key tools we would encourage you to consider in this regard are;
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Hopes and Concerns – which enables people to add their own flavour to the meeting objectives and to reflect agendas which might otherwise be hidden – this immediately helps people feel that they have a stake in the meeting
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Parking Lot – which enables important off-topic issues to be handled in a way that doesn’t distract the meeting from its intended focus – this helps avoid those unconnected from the off-topic issue from losing interest
We have created an instant template with a selection of some the simplest participative tools. Clicking the image below will open up as a live interactive tool in your browser. Simply copy its URL from the address bar on the page that opens and share it through your meeting chat with your team. They will instantly be able to participate with you by: adding their thoughts via sticky notes; seeing all that’s going on, and moving things around. For more on instant templates, click here.
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.