Four Ways to Energize Your Dull Team Meetings

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Four Ways to Energize Your Dull Team Meetings

By Alexander Loudon | MIT Sloan Management Review | September 30, 2024

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What can leaders do about lack of engagement in meetings? Many turn to rational approaches to keep meetings moving, such as offering attendees detailed agendas, pre-reads, and time management strategies. But that’s not enough. Meetings are more than transactional exchanges — they involve people who grapple with emotions, struggle with complexity, and are prone to influence by others.

To unlock a team’s full potential, leaders must embrace this reality and then make a few changes to shift the format from transactional exchange to meaningful dialogue. Doing so can help spark innovation, foster connection, and energize participants. Four tactics managers can use to make meetings more engaging and move people from apathy to energy: 

1. Shake up the usual.  When you run meetings the same way week after week, they quickly become predictable. One way to increase participants’ engagement is to rethink the meeting’s structure and approach.  Another way to make meetings more engaging is to change the physical context of the meeting room. Alternatively, you could conduct walking meetings or declare the meeting laptop- and screen-free. Such changes disrupt the usual pattern, which can refresh participants’ minds and increase alertness.
2. Address the elephant in the room.  When people avoid discussing difficult topics in meetings — perhaps out of fear of conflict or discomfort with the power dynamics — tensions will rise.  For leaders, addressing the emotional impact this behavior is having on the meeting without blaming others is important. The leader can voice their own frustration to dissipate the tension and open a conversation. This can also deepen the connections within the team.  For these approaches to work, leaders must create psychological safety, or an environment in which people feel safe to take risks, share ideas, and express themselves without fearing negative consequences. Leaders can achieve this in part by setting meeting principles with their teams to ensure that everyone feels comfortable participating in the discussion.
3. Make everyone feel heard.  People want to know that their opinions matter. If meeting attendees don’t feel this way, managers may notice silence or frequent interruptions, nonverbal cues like sighing and eye-rolling, or minimal responses to questions. Designing an inclusive meeting agenda ensures that participants feel valued and have an opportunity to contribute.  Managers can create inclusive meetings by using tactics like asking participants to write their views on Post-it notes before starting a discussion on a topic, or having someone summarize the previous speaker’s point before adding their input. This gives participants time to reflect and articulate their thoughts clearly and equalizes participation.  In discussions where a majority opinion faces some opposition, don’t aim to convince or overrule the minority. Instead, ask, “What can we learn from this viewpoint?” Often, the minority view holds wisdom.
4. Respect your company’s DNA.  How you engage employees in meetings should align with your organization’s DNA — its deeply rooted strengths and core values. Root strengths are skills and personality traits, such as resilience, while core values are guiding principles and beliefs, such as fairness. Ideally, your company DNA can be captured in three to five words, with each word accompanied by a sentence or two explaining its specific meaning to the organization.  Articulating the company’s DNA informs the do’s and don’ts of your meetings and helps your meetings resonate better with employees.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. What can leaders do about lack of engagement in meetings? Many turn to rational approaches to keep meetings moving, such as offering attendees detailed agendas, prereads, and time management strategies. But that’s not enough. Meetings are more than transactional exchanges — they involve people who grapple with emotions, struggle with complexity, and are prone to influence by others.
2. By shaking up the usual, addressing the elephant in the room, making everyone feel heard, and respecting your company’s DNA (its deeply rooted strengths and core values), you can transform meetings from apathetic to energetic. These strategies may require you to confront challenging structural issues and team dynamics. It will also take some trial and error to find what works and resonates with your team. The benefits, however, are undeniable: a productive, engaged, and connected team. You’ll see an improvement in meeting outcomes, and you might even find that meetings stop feeling like a chore.

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Topics:  Teams, Meeting, Productivity, Culture, Leadership