Ever wonder why some meetings it seems like everyone is engaged, but others people seem to be staring off at other screens. Some people are busy working on other things and now really paying attention to what the team is discussing? We are not talking about the mute button issues here either.
There is an effect that occurs especially in large meetings known as the Ringleman Effect. The Ringleman Effect is basically summed up that as when group size increases, engagement decreases. That’s right, when the size of the meeting grows then engagement actually decreases. This is why we have people asking to please repeat the question quite often.
During large meetings people tend to start working on other tasks “multi-tasking” which is actually ineffective. Science has shown that we are unable to focus on more than one task at a time with effectiveness. Think about how many crashes occur while someone is reading a text or email on their phone these days while driving.
The size of the meeting will dictate the expectation that the attendees will have. Most won’t realize it until they are in the meeting and see the list of attendees growing. When I speak about trust there are certain levels of trust that are given in one-on-one interactions compared to larger groups. So as the meetings get larger trust actually goes down. Trust effects engagement levels.
If we want to have higher levels of engagement in our meetings we need to start looking at who really needs to be in the meetings for the specific topic. We need to focus on who really needs to be in the meeting and not just dropping a calendar on every person’s schedule just to get the masses. I know some people in larger organizations will say that they need to get managers involved as well to move things along. Do we need them on the initial call to understand the situation though?
People also get irritated when a meeting is set up when they already have one or two meetings scheduled during that time. They feel like others don’t respect them enough to look at their calendars before setting up a meeting. That means that trust goes down.
What can we do to drive higher levels of engagement during meetings?
We can look at the topic at hand and only invite those that need to be invited to the meeting as one option. Do we need to have the finance team, engineering team, and management when there is a small quality issue with the manufacturing plant forgetting to paint the product, or packaging the product improperly?
We can set up a couple of meetings to focus on specific topics. Yes, it will take more time for us, but in order to get more traction, we need to move forward faster. We can also only have the specific team members needed for each topic to talk so there aren’t others sitting online wasting their time as well as not paying attention.
We can set shorter meetings and keep them specific in topic so we are only running 15 to 30 minute meetings instead of trying to block out the entire hour which people are less likely to give up. The smaller window of time will be a smaller investment to the attendees which will garnish more engagement.
We can also focus on building rapport with others. If there is extra time, then we can catch up with team members even virtually. We can see how they are doing, catch up on topics they may mention that they spoke in passing during the meeting. Show others we care will go a long way in gaining engagement during our meetings.
Focus on the other people we are asking to spend the time with us and how we can better use their time and we will have more effective meetings with more engagement.
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
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