5 Tips for Higher Engagement in the Hybrid Workplace

Mentimeter is the perfect tool for engaging your audience and ensuring a smooth transition out of fully remote work and into a more hybrid way of working. We have put together 5 top tips for how to achieve high engagement in your hybrid meetings.

1. Segmented pre-meeting check-ins

Poll result segmentation is one of the lesser used but most useful tools when leading remote or hybrid meetings. By asking an opening question of “Have you been working more from home or in-office lately?” Followed by any other question you might want to follow up with, like “Have you felt more stressed than usual this week?”, “Do you feel connected to your team?”, or “Have you felt productive this week?”. This way you get a clear impression of how different work-related topics are affecting the two groups. And, of course, all anonymously, so people will feel able to speak their mind and be honest with each other.

2. Open Ended questions work best

The key to a highly effective hybrid workplace is engagement. Luckily, we know the most effective way to engage an audience, whether in-person or from home. Through independent research conducted by the neuroscientists at Emotiv, we were able to find out that Mentimeter massively outperformed PowerPoint. But we also learned that the most effective Mentimeter slide type for reducing boredom and increasing engagement, interest, and cognitive load is the Open Ended slide type. People like to have their voices heard, and the Open Ended slide type is the most direct route to make that happen for your audience without filtering their responses through pre-determined answers or word clouds.

3. Engage early

In addition to showing the effectiveness of Open Ended questions for engaging your audience, research has shown that engaging early is key to maintaining the attention and interest of your audience. This is especially important for the people who are joining the meeting from home in a hybrid meeting. An interactive icebreaker helps to grab and keep attention for the duration of the meeting. A topical icebreaker can help to focus minds on the task at hand, but random or quirky ice breakers can also prove effective in snapping audience members out of whatever they had their mind on before the meeting to bring their attention fully on to the presentation.

Pro Tip: When it comes to ice breakers, we’ve got you covered. Check out our templates for inspiration.

Icebreaker - What Did You Eat for Breakfast?

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4. Engage often

Once you have your audience engaged and included in the discussion, this will gradually drop off the longer you go without giving them an opportunity to express themselves and have their voices heard. This is especially true for team members joining from home who have the option to open a new tab and give their attention to something else if you are not actively engaging with them. So be sure to intersperse interactive slide types throughout your presentation to keep your audience engaged. This is especially effective if you actually react to their engagement, be open to letting your audience lead the direction of the meeting and they will reward you with their attention.

5. Q&A all the way

Mentimeter’s Q&A feature is the great equaliser when it comes to hybrid meetings. No matter whether people are working from home or in the office, all questions submitted to a Q&A in Mentimeter are given equal priority and weight. That way you can ensure that the voices in the room are not given priority over those at home, and this function further serves to overcome the video-call shyness or silence we have all experienced at one point or another since the start of 2020. The fact that the submissions are anonymous serves to further blur the lines between the two camps.