How To Make Meetings Fun – But keeping your employees engaged during the meeting can be challenging. They can become restless if the meeting takes too long or if the discussion becomes repetitive.
In this article, we give you some great tips on how to make virtual meetings fun and boost employee engagement. We will also go over the most frequently asked questions about how to make virtual meetings fun.
How To Make Meetings Fun
So before you start brainstorming ideas or crunching numbers, try starting a non-work related conversation. This will help you eliminate the initial phase of silence and awkwardness.
Videoconference Meeting Icebreakers To Make Meetings More Fun
Teammates can blow off some steam by engaging in a series of virtual icebreaker questions. These can be anything from sharing the best birthday gifts they’ve ever received to talking about weekend plans.
By introducing virtual ice breakers or fun conversation starters, you allow your virtual team to connect with their colleagues.
Opening with a virtual icebreaker or fun check-in questions will help you warm up the team for a productive remote meeting. It encourages them to contribute more and collaborate easily, especially if you have a new team member on board.
This way, it acts as a virtual team building exercise and lays the groundwork for an effective virtual team meeting.
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So, in addition to making your virtual meetings fun, it’s crucial to keep them short and to the point. Otherwise, your employees may drop out in the middle of the presentation you spent hours preparing.
Highlight critical points in your presentation or docs by using bold fonts or distinct font colors so your remote employees can follow you easily.
You can create presentations centered around a particular theme so your virtual team stays connected throughout. For example, you can use catchphrases from a popular show while discussing critical points in your presentation.
Such an approach will elicit funny and relatable reactions from the team and make your online meeting as interactive as any in-person meeting. It also paves the way for virtual team building and improved communication during the video call.
Make Your Zoom Calls Fun With Backgrounds And Filters
Additionally, setting a time limit for your video meetings and sticking to predefined topics will help you avoid wasting your team’s time.
Once in a while, you can conduct a virtual team building activity asking each partner to introduce their adorable pets.
Almost every pet owner has had funny experiences preventing their pets from interrupting their virtual team meetings. So why not make them part of the virtual event next time?
Not to mention watching the antics of a Persian or Corgi cat at play will be a refreshing change from looking at pie charts and graphs.
Questions To Help Make Virtual Meetings More Meaningful And Interactive
Dedicating even 10 minutes of your meeting time to this fun activity can make your team more energized. Spending quality time with pets can reduce the stress of each participant and help them put their best foot forward at the meeting.
This temporary distraction can have a calming effect on the person and motivate them to take on the challenges of work in a positive way.
You can prepare voting questions that align with the meeting agenda. For example, if you have a meeting to decide on a marketing campaign name, you can create a poll that asks employees about the best option discussed so far.
In addition, you can use the breakout rooms feature to divide the virtual team into specific groups. It can be useful if you want to get the opinion of each team member from different departments. Data can provide valuable business insights for better decision making and workflow improvement.
Creative Ways To Make Virtual Meetings More Fun
The polling feature is a great way to facilitate virtual team building and get honest and critical responses from every meeting participant. It helps you identify the pitfalls in your plan and discuss possible solutions in your remote meeting.
For example, you can include food puns throughout your presentation such as ‘Avo Good Day!’, ‘You’re one in a melon’ and many more. At the end of the presentation, you can ask your remote meeting participants to name as many as they can.
You can reward the winning participant with extra stay time or personalized e-gift cards to make things even more interesting.
In addition to having fun in the virtual space, this will ensure that every employee follows the video call discussion closely. Gamification techniques also act as a virtual icebreaker and help create a relaxed atmosphere during the meeting.
Fun Ice Breakers For Work & Social Events
However, as the moderator of the meeting, you need to see that these games do not become aggressive or promote unhealthy competition in the workplace. Otherwise, you end up ruining the fun intention behind it.
You can create quizzes related to your workplace or industry. Once in a while, you can also choose non-work topics like pop culture, travel facts, cool brand names, etc.
Trivia questions or Q&A sessions are excellent team building activities hosted in the virtual space. It promotes healthy competition among remote employees and gives them a break from workplace bikinis.
It makes it easier for your online team to collaborate more efficiently on future projects. They get to understand the mindset of other members in the remote team and recognize their work strengths.
Fun Icebreaker Activities That Will Make Meetings Great Again
As a result, it promotes a great team culture and encourages a healthy exchange of ideas among remote meeting participants.
For example, Zoom lets you set a customizable virtual background to make your Zoom meeting fun and entertaining. You can even use the tool’s digital whiteboard to engage in team building games like Pictionary or doodle.
Also, if you are explaining a complex idea or business strategy in your presentation, try to include more images, GIFs and videos than words.
Your employees will be more likely to check out videos than read through verbose slides during a Zoom meeting. In other words, you’ll want to keep it simple yet impressive.
How To Make Virtual Meetings Fun For Remote Teams
Adding visual elements to your meetings can help you capture your team’s attention and drive remote employee participation.
Once in a while, during the event or the virtual meetings, you can gather all the cinephiles in your team, and ask each participant to share the best movie recommendations – there is nothing better than watching the team bond over coffee and cinema.
Using the breakout rooms feature (available in both Zoom and Microsoft Teams), you can divide the team into specific groups that share common interests.
For example, you can have a group of meeting participants discuss Money Heist, another debate about crazy Marvel fan theories, or explore the funniest F.R.I.E.N.D.S. memes.
High Impact Virtual Team Building Activities And Games For 2022
Hosting a fun activity like this makes it easier for remote team members to connect in the virtual world. In addition, it allows remote meeting participants to avoid small talk and avoid awkward silences in these sessions. In short, your virtual team meetings turn out to be more interactive and successful.
Some of the games you can play during the virtual meeting include remote work bingo, “Never never,” solving a murder mystery, decoding movie names from emojis, guessing the song right away five seconds, and much more.
You can incorporate these virtual team building activities into your Monday meetings to start a great week or Friday meetings to end the work week on a high note.
These games can help employees unwind, inspire great teamwork, and encourage open communication. Employees learn to work towards a common goal and even develop problem-solving skills that can help tackle day-to-day work challenges.
Fun Morning Meeting Games For Employees In 2023
For meetings that run too long, you can use the break time to enjoy a virtual team lunch with your colleagues. The important thing here is to spend some quality time with your team and keep up with each other’s well-being.
In this way, your employees are not restricted to discussions about work topics during the meeting. Instead, they can have interesting conversations and get to know each other organically through these team building activities.
As the meeting facilitator, you can plan a quick remote hunt for your team during the meeting. It will give them a much needed break from work discussions and act as a stress buster.
The rules can be very simple, and you can specify a list of household items that each teammate needs to collect and bring back to the table at a given time. It can include a mix of common and unusual household items such as:
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Once the time has passed and everyone collects again, you can check everyone’s collection through the screen sharing option and then declare the winner with the maximum number of items. You can even invite the winner to share an anecdote associated with any of these household items.
It goes without saying, if you can host such a fun activity in your weekly meetings, it will encourage team bonding and make work days more productive.
Here are answers to some of the most common questions about creating a fun and productive virtual meeting.
Virtual meetings allow your remote workers to loosen up and socialize with colleagues. Making virtual meetings fun is critical to fostering a positive team culture. It motivates your remote team to go the extra mile, reducing stress and employee burnout.
Easy Ways To Make Meetings Fun Or At Least, Not Suck
Otherwise, if your video conferences are all about work from start to finish, the meeting attendee is more likely to feel detached and disinterested.
You can use these video meetings to recognize your top performing employees and boost employee morale. It is also an excellent platform to welcome each new team member to ensure a great start to their journey
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