Are your meetings boring? Do you lose participants even before you start?

Do participants leave your meetings wishing they never showed up? Are you getting negative reviews for your meetings?

You should inject more fun into your meetings and see how things will change for good.

Here are a few tips to inject fun into your meetings.

Start on a light note/ Get people comfortable

You know about running from the kitchen to your computer not to be late for a virtual meeting or driving through traffic just to get into the office before a meeting starts. The pressure you feel since you will be speaking at some point during a meeting.

We most likely get into a meeting in a rush or at best, need time to settle in. To get everyone settled and fully participating, start by helping them get in and settle in.

Use icebreakers to get people to settle in. For example, ask participants to share something they are good at. Could be baseball, playing the piano, drawing, or as serious as algebra calculations. The idea is to get people talking about what they are really good at. By doing so, they will get comfortable speaking and settle into the meeting better.

Encourage contributions through interactive activities

Meetings are almost fruitless if the host/facilitator is unable to get participants involved and contribute to discussions. To enable participants to contribute fully, use interactive activities.

Rather than ask a question and then wait for participants to indicate they want to respond before getting participants to respond individually by taking turns, you can get them to respond together in an interactive manner. Here is an example

You want participants to share their ideas on how a product can enter a new market.

For a physical meeting, get everyone to write down their ideas within a time frame (say 5 mins), then stick their ideas up on a whiteboard. By doing so, everyone can see each other’s ideas and read through them, starting a conversation.

For virtual meetings, get everyone to type in their ideas in the chat session without hitting the send button. Once everyone is done typing, get them to send their ideas to the chat section at the same time. This creates a “Boom” feeling with tones of ideas flooding the chat section in seconds. Then the facilitator can lead everyone through discussing the ideas on display. Fun right? 😊

Finish Strong

The end is as important as the beginning. Just as you thought through how to get participants settled and comfortable from the beginning, it is important to also give participants a memorable exit from the meeting. People need to leave the meeting with clarity on what was said and where applicable, clarity on action points and next steps.

It is good to use strong conclusions to ensure everyone is leaving with a clear understanding of what was said and what is required of them. So, how do we inject fun into our conclusions to make them stick?

Here is an example. For a virtual meeting, participants can use fun stickers like ❤ or ❌ to indicate if they agree to or understand a conclusion or an action point.

There you go!

Injecting fun into your meeting is a fun thing to do. We hope you enjoyed reading.