Drool, blank stares to nowhere, incessant keyboard clicking over the conference phone speaker. These things are often synonymous with staff meetings and while I firmly believe my financial projection slides are brilliant and fascinating – I must admit that, for some, they may be drool-inducing.
Creating a framework for a staff meeting (at Mediafly we call them Town Hall meetings) can be difficult. How do you create the right environment that ensures the leadership team accurately conveys the information that employees want/need to hear while staying lively, entertaining and, perhaps, a little funny? What are ways that we as leaders can reduce (though probably never eliminate) the compelling draw to check email or multi-task?
At Mediafly we have found five tactics that help to keep engagement as high as possible, both for in-person and remote attendees, thereby reducing the drool factor:
1. Keep Remote Team Members “In the Room”
I’ve done it myself, I’m on a conference call and start drifting away from the conversation – because there is an email I have to get to or because my next call requires some last minute prep. Often the challenge here is technology-based. If folks are on camera and/or able to see the rest of the speaker/participants, there is a natural tendency to shift towards an active and visual participation instead of passive, distracted participation.
At Mediafly, we continue to test new technologies to help the team members that aren’t based in our Chicago office feel engaged, like providing the required hardware and software to remote folks that allow them to participate visually. We also set up a large display, camera and speaker system in Chicago that makes it feel like remote team members are in the room. This also makes it easier for each speaker to gauge engagement from non-verbal reactions, respond in real-time and improves overall engagement.
2. Coordinated Preparation
Personally, I feel the biggest challenge with delivering an engaging Town Hall meeting is coherently pulling together content from various speakers. Sometimes given all that is going on it’s impossible for me to find the needed time to put my own presentation together, much less create a cohesive presentation out of content from six very busy people –all while making it flow with segment supporting the broader message. At Mediafly, we try to tame this challenge by scheduling Town Halls to fall right after quarterly board meetings. This means that the material prepared for the board meeting can be easily leverage for the Town Hall as well; decreasing the amount of effort required by executive and ensuring timely delivery of information to our staff.
3. Get the Trifecta Right: Content, Frequency and Duration
We are incredibly fortunate that Mediafly team members (aka “Flyers”) give us tremendous feedback with regard to what they want to hear about (Hint: it’s not all financials, I know shocking right?!), how often they want to hear about it (quarterly) and how long they can endure hearing about it (90 minutes total, including Q&A). One thing we have recently implemented that holds us to the 90-minute timeline is a strict time limit for each presenter; complete with a timer and virtual bell. The bell takes some getting used to, but it does a nice job of keeping the pace of the meeting moving, keeping everyone within their time allotment and is a critical drool reduction strategy.
4. Have Some Fun
While not every leader has the capacity to be a gifted comedian and world-class lecturer rolled into one, there is no reason why once all of the mission critical information has been conveyed, you can’t conclude with little bit of fun. It’s even better when you can use it as a mechanism for recapping some of the previously shared information or as a means of providing new content that would otherwise fall on deaf ears. Wrap in some prize and you have in interactive way of engaging with you employee audience in a new way. So far we’ve played Mediafly trivia (fun for new team members), revenue mix and match, have brought in food (nothing like a Chicago deep dish pizza!) and given out treats for Q&A during especially dry content (Open Enrollment anyone?).
5. Don’t Forget to Ask…“How Are We Doing?”
Last, but not least, (and I know I speak of this a lot on my blog posts) we ask check-in questions. More specifically, we feel it is critical to regularly ask the staff how things are working at the end of each meeting. Our philosophy: You can’t get it right if you don’t take the time to ask questions.
While we are still working hard to create the optimized setup for our Town Hall meetings, our hope is that our continued efforts ensures that the amount of saliva cleanup is kept to the absolute minimum!
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