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The ENGAGE Method for Leading Great Meetings

If you want engaging virtual meetings, then learn the ENGAGE method. The method has been refined over the past 35 years and has a remedy for the most common virtual meeting problems. ENGAGE stands for:

• Engage and interact with every attendee.
• Never lead a meeting alone.
• Good looks.
• Air traffic control.
• Get productive with virtual tools.
• End your meeting on a high note.

A Brief Overview of the ENGAGE Method

Engage and interact with every attendee. If you want engagement, engage! If you want your next virtual meeting to be engaging, then try different ways to engage your attendees. Greet all of your attendees as they arrive. Have every attendee check in. Ask your attendees to chat. Keep track and check in with the attendees who haven't said anything and give them the opportunity to pass if they don't want to contribute.

Go to bit.ly/evmengage to see a video of a professional host giving a demonstration of engaging and interacting with every attendee.

Never lead a meeting alone. If you want engagement, assign an attendee or someone you invite to a meeting a role in the meeting (after you have trained them). Roles include chat engagement, muting and unmuting, renaming, and security. Any or all of these roles can be delegated. They must be engaged to do their job and it allows you, the host, to focus on connecting with your attendees.

Go to bit.ly/evmnever to see a video of a professional host working with a producer as an example of never leading a meeting alone.

Good looks. If you want engagement, look good. Take a shower. Dress up. Frame your face. Clean up your background. Turn on your lights. Wear your company gear. Wear bright colors.1 Like Bruno Mars says, "If you want to show up, then show out."

Go to bit.ly/evmgood to see a video of multiple backgrounds evaluated for good looks.

Air traffic control. If two or more people talk at the same time, no one can hear. An engaging meeting is when you understand what is said. You can help by creating air traffic control. From physical to virtual hand raises or other types of talking sticks, help find a way for attendees to communicate without stepping on each other's auditory toes. Until a videoconferencing platform perfects simultaneous audio, use air traffic control.

Go to bit.ly/evmair to see a video of a professional host demonstrating air traffic control.

Get productive with virtual tools. A virtual meeting is about getting work done. We all have to meet to get our job done. As the host, you need to value the time even more, because as soon as you log in, you start an invisible timer to each attendee's "I'm done" factor, or when they cease to be productive. Virtual meeting fatigue is real and you're doing everyone a favor if you can get your collaborative work done and get back to nonvirtual meeting work. Arrive on time. Plan. Value each other's time. Make decisions everyone buys into. Document your decisions. Get out. Your attendees will feel valued and more engaged if you can host productive virtual meetings.

Go to bit.ly/evmget to see a professional host working with attendees to get productive with virtual tools.

End your meeting on a high note. You want your attendees to have more energy after your meeting. Product teams did research on product demonstration meetings. They discovered that if you end your meeting on a high note, customers are more likely to buy your product.2 Your meetings are exactly the same. If you can find a way to end positively, your attendees are more likely to come back and they are more likely to be engaged. Ask for feedback. Do a cheer. Play a video. Celebrate success. Say thank you. Then log off.

Go to bit.ly/evmend to see a professional host end their meeting on a high note.

The ENGAGE Method in Depth

Engage and Interact with Every Attendee

As the host of a virtual meeting, one of the ways to create engagement is to engage with every attendee.

Engaging every attendee solves one of the biggest problems with virtual meetings, which is logging in and feeling left out. Every attendee wants to feel valued and know that their work is meaningful. All you have to do is engage them, which you can do by talking to them, by chat or by one of the many virtual tools available to you.

In a one-on-one meeting, you'll find it easier to be engaged in the conversation. As more and more attendees join your meeting, you'll have to think about different ways to engage with every attendee. The following is an easy activity to engage with every attendee.

Check-in

Goals: Show how checking in with every attendee can make your meeting more engaging. Ensure that every attendee's audio and/or video is working.

• Time: 5-30 minutes
• Participants: 2-25
• Technology: Audio, video, chat
• Category: Opener

Game Summary: Have every attendee check in by saying their name, location, and where they work.

Rules: Attendees must raise their hand to speak. If their video is not on, they need to raise their virtual hand or unmute and say their name. Choose one person to be air traffic control and if two people want to speak at the same time, the air traffic controller will choose an order. Every attendee must have an opportunity to check in. If an attendee's audio and video is not working, ask them to check in by text.

This is the most basic activity that can help you engage and interact with every attendee. You may see more engagement during your meeting after a check-in and you may see more engagement after your meeting if your meeting was successful.

The following is a collection of best practices.

Hello: Make sure to greet every attendee as they arrive for the meeting. There's nothing worse than arriving in a strange new location and having no one talk to you. Think of yourself as the greeter or welcoming host to your virtual meeting by saying hello.

"A person's name is the sweetest sound": This quote comes from Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Use an attendee's name as often as possible. If someone is new, ask if you are pronouncing their name correctly. If you get the pronunciation, make a phonetic note on how to say their name. Make sure you have the correct spelling when you edit or transcribe their name. There's no faster way to disengage someone than to miss a detail like their name. Using an attendee's name is a sure way to engage them, as they will look back to the screen and figure out what's going on.

Chat: If your meeting starts to be bigger than 15 attendees or if you have a lot of presentation material, then you can use chat to engage your guests. Even if you are in the middle of a discussion with an attendee, you can send a quick "Hello" chat to someone who just logged in without disturbing your conversation.

Engage Your Quiet Attendees: One of the most common challenges is getting attendees who have their video or audio off to engage in the meeting. These attendees are quite often shy or introverted. Help create a safe environment for your attendees to contribute. A good practice is to wait longer than is comfortable for you when you ask a group question. Allow the attendees to figure out when they want to answer the question. The reason this will get your quiet attendees to engage is because they are offering to talk when they are ready, not when you are ready. A professional host shared that he had an attendee who did not want to turn on her camera. The host thanked her for sharing by audio. The host continued the meeting and eventually the attendee offered to answer a question on her own. Later in the meeting, the attendees were tasked with writing in a shared document. For this quiet attendee, it turned out that writing was her passion. This attendee went on to write 75% of a work assignment. The host believed she contributed because she felt safe. Google conducted 18 months of research for high-performing teams and discovered that psychological safety is one of the top five factors. Creating psychological safety in your virtual meetings will help them be more engaging. See Chapter 3 for more on psychological safety.

Log in Early/Stay Late: The most important meeting is the meeting before the meeting and the meeting after the meeting. One of my strategies for being the host of a virtual meeting is to log in 10-30 minutes early and stay logged in for 10-30 minutes after the meeting. This will give you extra time to meet your attendees and get to know them better before everyone is logged in. Also, it will give you time to have extra conversations after an important meeting to clarify and plan. I discovered this secret while working at Microsoft. I was able to have important conversations with busy but important developers, executives, and employees who were too busy to schedule a one-on-one. I got the information I needed and I accelerated many projects and relationships this way.

Create a Checklist: In smaller meetings, from 5 to 15 people, you can ensure that you have engaged every attendee by creating a simple checklist of every attendee and making sure you check off each one as you...