Four Ways to Energize Your Dull Team Meetings

You call your team into a meeting to discuss a looming decision. As the meeting begins, you notice that your questions are being met with little response. Most people seem uninterested while a few dominate the conversation. You’re not making progress on reaching a decision. It’s better than an open revolt, but the level of apathy bodes ill for any real energy around the next move. You aren’t any better equipped to decide the issue than you were before. This is a scenario that leaders hate to find themselves in.

Meanwhile, employees everywhere are spending an increasing chunk of their workweeks in meetings, which they often find repetitive, unstructured, too long, or just plain boring. As a result, meetings become a drain rather than a driver of productivity.

What can leaders do about this lack of engagement? Many turn to rational approaches to keep meetings moving, such as offering attendees detailed agendas, prereads, and time management strategies. But that’s not enough. Meetings are more than transactional exchanges — they involve people who grapple with emotions, struggle with complexity, and are prone to influence by others.

To unlock a team’s full potential, leaders must embrace this reality and then make a few changes to shift the format from transactional exchange to meaningful dialogue. Doing so can help spark innovation, foster connection, and energize participants. Let’s explore four tactics managers can use to make meetings more engaging and move people from apathy to energy.

1. Shake up the usual.

When you run meetings the same way week after week, they quickly become predictable. One way to increase participants’ engagement is to rethink the meeting’s structure and approach.

In 2019, for example, executives at energy company Equinor held a meeting to discuss the future strategy of their company. Rather than putting together a typical presentation with slides, Equinor’s head of corporate strategy development introduced a card game. The team circulated 16 statements, each describing a potential core belief of the company. For each statement, executives showed a thumbs-up or thumbs-down card and explained why they approved or disapproved of the core belief. The interactive and unconventional approach relaxed executives, encouraged participation, and helped the group reach a consensus.

Keep in mind the various personality types within the group when you try a new meeting approach.[