How Smart Leaders Create Engagement in Zoom Meetings

What if complaining about Zoom fatigue is missing the point? What if there is a window of opportunity for creating engagement in Zoom meetings that is going to close if we don’t jump through it?

Here’s the scenario:

Our annual meeting switched from in-person to Zoom to accommodate the quarantine. The group included leaders from a variety of industries — people at the top of their fields with impressive accomplishments.

But I was in for a shock.

The ones I expected to lead — who normally have a commanding presence at the in-person meetings — failed to connect at all.

One looked down his nose as he spoke. He came off dismissive and condescending.

Another’s face was dark. He came off guarded, as if in a witness protection program.

One leaned back in his chair and looked at the wall as if he were on a conference call. He looked lazy and disinterested.

But here’s the surprising thing…

Other leaders connected amazingly well. They came off open, authentic and knowledgeable. Clearly, they had put thought into this and used the medium to its fullest.

These are the people that the group engaged with. Others — the ones normally knocking it out of the park — were left behind. The difference was not subtle.

My takeaway?

Those who adapt their leadership to the new digital reality are going to have a decisive edge.

If you are battling in this area, you are at risk of losing everything you’ve done to position yourself as a leader. Fortunately, creating engagement via screens is a skill you can learn.

Why are dynamic leaders so bad at creating engagement on Zoom?

Probably Saturday morning cartoons.

Hear me out…

Watching television is passive — which means we have thousands of hours of muscle memory of passivity that kicks in whenever there is a screen in front of us.

It doesn’t matter that logically we know we are meeting with people live. It’s hard to overcome what’s been hard wired through practice.

While awareness of the phenomenon helps, a quick fix is to use a standing desk for Zoom calls. Standing is an active posture, and more importantly, it is a physical interruption of the muscle memory for sitting on a couch passively consuming media. (It also disrupts the muscle memory of all of those hours of conference calls where you were multitasking without being seen.)

All of this to say that being bad at Zoom calls isn’t your fault. But if you don’t work to get good at it, others will pass you by.

How to position yourself as a leader in a virtual room.

In-person, some people have a magnetic energy. They draw people to them. They are listened to.

However, in the virtual world, this presence doesn’t always come through — usually because there are things working against you. Here are three questions to ask yourself:

Is your technology minimizing your presence?

Humans are biologically wired to connect with faces. (Our theory is that this is why Facebook beat out MySpace, but that’s a different article.)

If your camera placement works against eye contact or makes you appear to be looking down at people, you are at a disadvantage. If your lighting obscures your expressions, you are at a disadvantage. If your voice sounds tinny or harsh through your computer’s onboard microphone, you are at a disadvantage.

Take a moment to notice how you show up in the gallery view and compare your image with those of others. This is an important exercise. For specific tips on how to improve your set up check out this cheat sheet from Idibri.

What are you communicating with your background?

First impressions are not complicated. Humans make decisions quickly — and we aren’t even smart about it. You can use this to your advantage.

Bookshelves can make you look smart. Industrial finishes can make you look cool. Paintings or musical instruments can make you seem creative. Rich traditional finishes can make you seem wise.

But there’s a catch…

You cannot pull this off with a virtual background. They glitch when you move, so people know they are fake. And you won’t get the benefit of the doubt. Most will jump to the conclusion that you are hiding an unmade bed or piles of clutter rather than assuming that you are working from a room supportive of your leadership style.

In an online environment, background communicates more than the clothes you are wearing. Make your background work for you.

How good is your preshow?

There can be as much as a 5-minute gap between when people start entering a Zoom meeting room and when the meeting starts. While leaders may naturally leverage this time in the real world to connect with participants, people often forget to do it in the virtual one. (Then the dead air cues everyone’s muscle memory for passivity.)

Greeting people by name as they enter and making small talk positions you as a host in the room and automatically confers leadership. While there are a wide range of questions that can work during the “preshow” here are some go/to questions with the purpose behind them if you don’t already have go/to questions of your own:

• What’s been the highlight of your day so far? (Create positive thinking)
• What would make today’s meeting valuable to you? (Align content to participants)
• What are you binge-watching right now? (Create ease and camaraderie.)
• What surprised you most about the shift to working from home? (Build empathy.)
• What’s your stance on pineapple as a pizza topping? (Spark light conversation)

You don’t have to be the leader of the meeting to have game in the preshow. Just start engaging and connecting the other participants. At the very least, you will save the virtual room from 5 minutes of awkward waiting time.

How to create engagement (even when people won’t turn on their cameras.)

Engagement is created both when participants have interest in the meeting, and when they are interactively participating.

How you create engagement on a Zoom call depends on the type of call you are hosting. For this, we are going to need a short sidebar on theatre design (aka. creating engagement with groups in a physical space).

In a theatre, there are three types of communication flow:

1. From the stage into the audience.

2. From the audience back to the stage.

3. From the audience to each other.

Different types of events prioritize different paths of communication. If you know which type of communication flow you want to prioritize, it will cue you to the best strategies to create engagement.

For example:

Presentation

A presentation prioritizes communication from the stage out. The person on the stage has the biggest voice in the room. In the Zoom world this means there is a main screen that features one thing — the content of the speaker. Creating engagement in this Zoom meeting might include:

• Prerecording portions of the presentation so that the content is tight, professional, and delivered in a shorter amount of time.
• Using an emcee to host the presentation and interact with the attendees.
• Using polling tools to take the pulse of the audience throughout the presentation.
• Featuring people in the audience in your examples.
• Sending teaser videos to the audience ahead of time so they have elevated interest in the content when they join the meeting.
• Using the whiteboard or annotation features to make the presentation feel more interactive.

Responsive

A responsive event — like a town hall — prioritizes feedback from the audience to the stage. In a digital meeting space, this means there are dedicated ways for the audience to respond and be heard. Creating engagement in this Zoom meeting might include:

• Using a moderator to prompt discussion and host the room.
• Having someone on the call whose job is to monitor and respond to chat.
• Using a graphic facilitator to capture attendee comments. The graphic facilitator would be a co-host and share their screen. (The co-host feature has to be enabled in settings.)
• Share a cloud-based document with a short url (like bit.ly) that people can contribute to in real time.

Sense of Community

A sense of community is achieved when the highest priority is the communication between the members of the audience to each other. Think about arenas when a wave breaks out or how cheering promotes more cheering — that’s communication from the audience to each other. Creating this sense of community in the digital world might include:

• Visuals and messaging that make participants feel part of something.
• Recommending that participants select “Gallery View” so they can see the other participants. (Include a visual to show how to do this. If people are used to other platforms, they may not know what you are talking about.)
• Sharing a screen with Walls.io or Poll Everywhere to display attendee-generated content.
• Using Zoom’s breakout room feature to create smaller groups. (This can be random or assigned.) Note that one of the comments we get the most using breakout rooms is that it helps if there is a facilitator in the room.

How do you make your Zoom meeting more interactive?

Zoom and other virtual meeting platforms have a variety of tools to make a virtual meeting more interactive. The thing is few people use them without being coached to do so. When we’ve been programmed to be passive in front of screens, it can take some intention to shift the culture from being passive to being more interactive.

One of the best ways to boost this interaction is to “seed the audience.” Seeding an audience is where you have a few “plants” that have been coached on how to respond. (Performers use this in theatre all the time.) Once the “plants” break the ice of interaction it becomes easier for other participants to follow.

You can do this by coaching your “plants” to:

1. Use reactions. (On Zoom this is clapping or a thumbs up).

2. Use the “raise hand” feature.

3. Have questions ready to post into chat.

4. Unmute and chime in.

5. Use the whiteboard or annotations.

Remote meetings will usually start with a passive culture and it takes intention to make it interactive. This is something that can be built over time. When choosing your “plants” don’t go for the people who are used to jumping out there. Choose the intentional people who care about your mission and explain what you are trying to achieve and how they can help.

Then you’ve saved your normal “first responders” to jump on board once the plants cue the interactive behavior.

What do leaders miss in creating engagement on Zoom?

Virtual event expert, Matt Emerson, President of CEAVCO, shares:

“Zoom fatigue is real, and there is so much bad PowerPoint. Leaders have to get better at making sure the content is engaging. It’s easy for the mind to wander or for people to multitask. In general, we have to plan to deliver content in shorter chunks with more intentional breaks.”

“A virtual event requires just as much care and coordination as a live event does. You need to develop a ‘run of show.’ What’s on the screen when? How are transitions going to take place? How will prerecorded videos be delivered? A lot of the planning and skills we use in the four walls of a venue are useful in a virtual meeting.”

Emerson continues, “Another thing people miss is bandwidth. If you are working from home and have two teenagers watching Netflix or playing video games, it can create glitches in your feed. Or, if you happen to be traveling and the Wi-Fi is poor, you need to consider this and have a backup plan.”

This last one burned me recently when I was leading a strategic planning session for a group of 25 architects. My lighting and visuals were on point. I had my run sheet in front of me. And 10 minutes in, I lost my connection. Luckily, my graphic facilitator — who had a copy of the run sheet — jumped in to lead, but it took me several minutes to get back on which cost momentum. You can bet I will have a bandwidth backup plan on the next strategic planning session I lead.

What opportunities do you gain meeting in a virtual space?

Emerson says “There are a couple of distinct advantages to meeting virtually. First, you can broaden your audience because both geography and the meeting time becomes irrelevant. We’ve seen people keep their content live for a window of time and achieve a much broader reach.”

“The second advantage is lower overhead. We’ve seen not-for-profit organizations take their events virtual and achieve much higher net take because there is no cost for a venue, valet, or a catered chicken dinner,” highlights Emerson.

My favorite opportunity is that virtual meetings give leaders the chance to learn the medium which can translate into a host of other opportunities. The better leaders become at engaging people on Zoom, the easier it is to craft a message and engage an audience on other digital platforms. YouTube, social media, your company’s website… You build a new active muscle memory for screens.

And that creates an edge.

Craig Janssen consults with leaders to help them navigate the business and cultural impact of shifts in technology. Learn more at craigjanssen.com.