How to encourage participation in online meetings with Mentimeter
Online meetings and remote working may be unprecedented for some organizations. You may be wondering how you can keep the same level of engagement and interaction as you would in a regular face-to-face meeting whilst working away from the office. Mentimeter supports online meetings by enabling you to collaborate with colleagues and get real-time input anytime, anyplace with an unlimited audience size.
How can you get people to participate in online meetings?
Use Mentimeter for interactive presentations
Once you are connected via your chosen online communication tool (e.g. Zoom or Slack) share your screen and the presentation code. For more information on how to use Mentimeter to work remotely use this guide.
Using Mentimeter means that you aren’t limited by distance. Colleagues can connect to a presentation wherever they are located. It also means that you get contributions from coworkers in real-time and can discuss, cooperate and work together to make business decisions in a quick and effective manner.
Enable emojis on Mentimeter
Online meetings can be hard to gauge people’s reactions if the video camera is switched off. With Mentimeter you have the option to enable emoji reactions such as ‘thumbs up’ ‘thumbs down’ ‘love heart’ to get a feel of whether the participants agree or disagree with what you are saying.
Turn on Q&A on all slides
Turning on Q&A on all slides in your Mentimeter presentation allows colleagues to ask questions whenever they come to mind. This also limits a ‘lecture’ style approach to meetings and encourages participation and for coworkers to share their opinion.
Use the interactive questions types
With Mentimeter you have access to a variety of different interactive question types. The participants don’t require to download any special software, they just go to menti.com and join the presentation.
Interactive question types such as using multiple-choice questions, scales or any of the others enable you to interact and engage with your colleagues wherever they are. If remote working is making you feel slightly isolated you can use the multiple-choice or live polls question types to simply ask people how they are doing to feel connected to your team. By introducing word clouds, live polls or ranking questions, the online meeting attendees have to contribute their ideas to the presentation. You can also keep track of how many people have answered by looking at the number in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
Use the quiz feature
Nothing bores people more than slide after slide with lots of data and information. People are much more likely to switch off and not pay attention to the meeting. Solution? Introduce a fun quiz to break the ice, help to maintain team company culture and create some friendly rivalry no matter the distance.
Have a good balance between content and interactive slides
Working from home often means more potential distractions which makes fully tuning into an online meeting harder. Participants can easily start using their phones or searching on the internet and ignore the presentation and miss the key points. Therefore having interactive slides and involving the audience every 5-10 minutes is important to keep their attention and create purposeful engagement.
For tips on how to improve working remotely check out our ‘7 tips for remote working to improve productivity’
