Zoom meeting fatigue. You may or may not be experiencing it, but likely believe that it’s real. Why are virtual meetings more tiring than in person ones? According to a piece on ideas.ted.com, called Zoom fatigue is real, here’s why video calls are so draining, “People feel like they have to make more emotional effort to appear interested, and in the absence of many non-verbal cues, the intense focus on words and sustained eye contact is exhausting.” As the host of your next meeting, what can you do to make your meeting effective, not just another virtual meeting causing your participants to zone out?
Ditch your Zoom Background
If you’ve spent hours scouring the internet to find the perfect Zoom meeting background, unfortunately, we have some bad news for you. Quantum Communications recently polled over 500 professionals and found, “If you want to be taken seriously, you should definitely ditch your creative or funny Zoom background.” How does this make a meeting more effective? Participants are less distracted by each other’s virtual backgrounds, and more focused on what’s actually being said.
Prioritize
If you can send out a clear agenda prior to the meeting, it will help keep your meeting on track. There’s nothing worse than a meeting veering off track to discuss something that one participant needs clarity on that no one else signed up to listen to. Or, conversely, everyone has a chance to add a topic whether it’s important or not, and a one hour meeting takes two and a half hours because everyone is given a chance to have their agenda item discussed. If you feel like you’re “herding cats” in every virtual meeting you’re in, try the agenda idea. You’ll not only take the control back in your meetings, but have a grateful set of meeting participants who are focused and ready to discuss the topic at hand.
Make sure you’re sharing the mic
It’s the human condition, we would all rather talk than listen. The problem is, that means we have a tendency to “hog the mic.” The only time people don’t want to participate in a meeting is when they’re unprepared, or they’ve paid a lot of money to listen to someone else’s life story. So, if you want your attendees to be prepared to speak, give them the chance. And unless you’re a past president, tech icon or billionaire that’s prepared to tell your audience the secret to your success, you should assume that your meeting attendees won’t want to spend an entire hour listening to you talk. Hogging the mic and seven other things you should NOT do in meetings according to Forbes.com can be found here, and they’re good things to note.
Consider instituting a no phone rule
Do you know how many of your meeting attendees are likely multi-tasking during your virtual meeting? A survey from gingerpublicspeaking.com that polled over 400 professionals found that “99% of people admitted to multi-tasking some or all of the time during online meetings and presentations.” How do you make the multi-tasking stop, and get your attendees to focus? Simply state that phones aren’t allowed in the meeting, and if they must take a call or respond to a text, they’ll have to leave the meeting. Not only will that likely deter people from making choices to pay attention to something other than the meeting, but it could also inspire people to participate in a meeting when they previously seemed uninterested. Additionally, you may also find that participants will get to the point more quickly because they can’t multi-task during your meeting, and ultimately everyone gets “time back in their day.”
Running an efficient meeting isn’t impossible to excel at virtually, but it does present more challenges as we have outlined here. However, the other key to getting your audience engaged is to know the platform you’re running the meeting on, and use its bells and whistles to drive participation and engagement. Poll the audience, ask questions that require everyone to chat an answer to the host, and give up the mic often. All of these actions will drive further participation and could ultimately get business done in one meeting that would have required two if key stakeholders were on their phones, IM’ing, or attending the meeting with their video off and themselves muted. Use some of these strategies in your next meeting to drive efficiency, participation, and ultimately inspire more people to be excited and be prepared for your next meeting.