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Virtual meetings are now par for the course in most workplaces. But keeping participants engaged can be a struggle. Linda Trim offers some fixes.
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Virtual meetings, while convenient, may suffer from one key pitfall - managed incorrectly, it can be a real struggle to keep team members engaged and alert. In at least one poll, participants have reported sleepiness levels 28% higher in virtual meetings compared to face-to-face meetings.
But there are strategies to create more productive calls and keep cognition healthy and high.
If you have ever fought off yawns during a video call, don’t be too hard on yourself.
In a 2023 American Psychological Association study of virtual and in-person meetings at two global corporations, it was found that lots of people doze off—or find their minds wandering—in online meetings for one key reason: because not enough is done to keep them involved.
Increased eye contact, facial processing and synchronised neural activity between individuals can help in face-to-face discussions. By mimicking these conditions, there are ways to make virtual meetings much more engaging, too.
Here is how:
Give crucial information in advance
In many workplaces, remote meetings fall into the trap of becoming a way to share information, instead of a place for making decisions or hashing out ideas. The result is tedium: Passive participation in a meeting makes people sleepy and leads to a 21% reduction in cognitive performance after the meeting, hurting their efficiency.
One way to avoid information dumps is to share the meeting materials beforehand—so people can go over them in advance at their own pace and not just listen to a presentation about them. That helps focus the meeting on interactive discussions rather than time-consuming slideshows and lectures.
Keep the meetings small
Another way to keep people from being passive bystanders is to keep remote meetings small. Instead of asking everyone to join a meeting just to get information, people can get the optimal engagement and performance by including only the essential personnel. Smaller groups appear to be better at collaborating and solving problems, on average, than large ones.
Shorten meetings and take breaks
It’s critical to manage the length and structure of meetings to keep them effective. People generally start getting sleepy within 10 minutes, our research shows, and drowsiness increases significantly after 30 minutes.
To keep people engaged, meetings should be brief and dynamic, and involve discussions, so people have a reason to get involved instead of listening passively. Lengthy monologues or reading directly from slides can frustrate people and make their attention drift. Passive listening to lengthy monologues can make people disengaged and sleepy.
Warn people about multitasking
If people feel like the meeting isn’t relevant to them, they might start checking their email or doing other things, especially if their camera is turned off. When participants in our study felt disengaged—that the meeting content didn’t require their effort—they were 43% more likely to multitask. When participants saw their manager multitasking, they boosted their own multitasking behavior by 30%.
The simplest way to avoid this, of course, is just ask people not to multitask. Also try giving meetings interactive elements like a chat or breakout-room discussions to encourage active participation and help maintain focus.
Make it easy to give nonverbal cues
Facial expressions and other nonverbal cues play a vital role in delivering feedback during in-person conversations. Without those cues, people feel isolated and lose the sense of a shared experience.
Virtual meetings can be a disaster if people are facing a screen full of black boxes with initials. Our analysis indicates that engagement and alertness levels in meetings decrease by 23% when participants’ cameras are turned off, as opposed to meetings conducted with cameras on.
The best way to counter the problem is to keep their cameras on during virtual meetings, so the speaker can get nonverbal feedback. Likewise, reaction emojis can quickly and non verbally express a feeling. The "raise hand" feature can also be used as a cue, indicating a person's desire to speak without interrupting the speaker.
Hide your picture from yourself but not from others
Staring at your own image is distracting and heightens self-consciousness. People become more aware of, and concerned with, their own appearance and actions, leading to increased anxiety and distraction. And that can wreck online meetings, as people’s attention is diverted from the discussion, decreasing their ability to engage effectively.
Most virtual-meeting tools allow you to hide your camera previous while still keeping other meeting participants visible — helping to increase engagement between participants while avoiding camera-related distraction and anxiety.
Linda Trim is a director at workplace design consultancy Giant Leap.
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