How To Make Virtual Team Meetings FUN

How To Make Virtual Team Meetings Fun

3 Tips to Liven Things Up and Take Everyone Off Autopilot

How do you make virtual meetings more fun? It’s a question worth pondering because as fun decreases over time, so does morale and motivation. 

As we’re doing more and more remote work, it’s easy to get burned out staring at a grid of pixelated boxes. Good news though. After consulting with some of the most innovative (and fun) companies and universities on the planet, I’ve learned some fantastically simple strategies that can make a big difference in your remote meetings. 

In this chapter, I’m going to unpack three tips you can use whenever you’re leading a virtual meeting. I’m also going to describe a framework for you to assess your agenda, syllabus or conference plan. If you’re not checking these boxes, it’ll almost guarantee that your virtual meeting isn’t going to be fun.

Before we dive in, you might wonder, why should we add elements of fun into meetings? Whether for its own sake or another purpose, there is reason for us to make this a priority.

I had a teacher and mentor once who shared with me an acronym for fun. It had an extra n—FUNN: Functional Understanding Not Necessary. Put another way, a nephew of mine used to run around at family reunions saying, “Fun is fun.” There are some things that just bring us joy. We don’t need to unpack why. We don’t need to understand the purpose behind them. They’re just fun, and there’s value in that.

Then there’s another type of fun that is about more than our own amusement. Fun can, for example, translate into deeper engagement. As an experiential educator, I care about that type of fun too.

Fun Theory

If you haven’t heard of fun theory, it’s pretty phenomenal. The idea is that if you make something fun, you can actually improve performance and change people’s behavior.

Fun theory is an initiative introduced to me by Volkswagen. The car company produced a video (i.e., clever ad) where a team tries to see if they can get more people to take the stairs instead of using an escalator in a subway in Stockholm.

Naturally, as human beings, we default to our comfort zone. We tend to take the path of least resistance. Most people had been taking the subway escalator. Then the Volkswagen team came in one night and turned the entire staircase into a functioning piano. Every stair you stepped on played a note. Such a fun concept, right?

The video reveals that after the stairs became musical, significantly more people put in the extra effort to make joyful (and painful) noise. Some even zigzagged, jogged, jumped up and down or danced across the keys. In fact, Volkswagen found that 66% more people than normal chose to take the stairs over using the escalator.

If we don’t prioritize fun, then we risk people being asleep on autopilot in our meetings—in other words, riding up the escalator. There’s immense business and educational value to making meetings more enjoyable.

Five States of Mind

To understand how to liven things up in your meetings, agendas, syllabuses, classes, retreats and virtual conferences, you’ve first got to know your people. Specifically, you have to understand that there are five different mindsets that people generally bring to the table.

These are states of mind, not traits. That’s an important distinction. At any given time, a person can oscillate between any of these states. 

These include:

• Curmudgeons 
• Critics
• Consumers
• Contributors
• Connectors

The middle three mindsets above are the most common ones you’ll find with meeting participants, students or staff.

Critics are very comfortable pointing out what’s wrong with the meeting. They think the meeting is boring and that it should have been an email. They’re perfectly content to poke holes, but totally uninterested in doing anything to improve matters.

Then you have consumers, who aren’t sour on what’s happening, but they’re passively consuming the information you share. They’re not looking to get involved. They’re just kind of there, cruising. 

Next, you have contributors. These are people who are not victims of boring virtual meetings. They want to add to the culture. They get involved, knowing they can increase engagement and help make the meeting more fun. Leaders can’t make meetings fun without participation—it just won’t work. The team must contribute for meaningful fun to be present.

After critics, consumers and contributors, you have two other types of people at your meetings who couldn’t be more different. Curmudgeons are people who are just living in a perpetual state of crankiness. They tend to suck the air out of the room, and contribute very little. No matter what you say or do, curmudgeons probably won’t like it. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, above contributors, you’ve got connectors. These are people who become hubs for contribution. They are amazing at connecting people to people, and people to ideas. They are really great at making fun contagious in any given circumstance.

Changing Minds: How to Improve the State of Your Team

The good news is that you may be able to influence your team members’ states of mind—to a degree. When you look at your agenda or meeting outline, ask yourself which mindset each component might put participants in. Then put each meeting or agenda element into the appropriate bucket. 

For example, if you have a meeting item that is just you talking to the team, that goes into the consumer bucket. If you’re thinking team members might not like the meeting, put them into the critic bucket. If participants woke up on the wrong side of the bed, they’re going to be curmudgeons. None of those categories is a recipe for a fun virtual meeting.

What is a recipe for a fun virtual meeting is creating opportunities for people to contribute and connect. As you set your agenda, think about what kind of feeling or energy you want to create in your online gathering. And don’t be afraid to try something new.

As someone who helps organizations improve connection and engagement for a living, I was curious to do a Google search on fun. I like metaphors, so I typed “fun is like …” into the search field. The top result that came up for me? “Fun is like life insurance.” Wait, what?

I couldn’t help but laugh. How could this be? It didn’t make much sense, and that’s what made it funny. Comedy often takes us in a totally different direction than we anticipated going.

In the same way, to create fun in your meetings, you’ve got to do something different. You can’t do the same old thing, or just make a subtle change that might not have an impact. But you don’t have to overhaul your meetings, either. 

Here are three simple, unconventional ways to inject more fun into your gatherings.

1. Hide Your Self-View

On most video platforms—like Zoom, Skype and Google Meet—you can hide your self-view. I don’t know why the self-view is on by default. Human beings were not designed to be in meetings watching themselves being in meetings. It’s weird and exhausting, and it contributes to video conference burnout. 

Even worse, it puts all your focus on you. When you hide self-view, you’re able to shift your focus to your team or your students. When you put the focus on others, you support a contributor mindset, and that’s where the fun begins.

Research done at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab identified this self-view dynamic as one of four main factors that contribute to Zoom fatigue. The other three, in case you’re curious, were: 

1. Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense.
2. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.
3. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats (i.e., overstimulation).

A teacher of mine used to say that “once you say something, half the power leaves it.” Perhaps calling these dynamics will empower your group to navigate around them. 

2. Use the World Around You

One of the gifts that working remotely has given us is that we have this entire life of context all around us. I can introduce you to my son Otto by simply holding up a picture or sharing a virtual background. But if we were in a conference room together, I might need to spend three minutes unlocking my phone trying to navigate to a cute, recent picture to share. 

Working at home means a team of 10 actually has 10 different offices with different contexts, cultures and stories. When we share that context in creative ways, it can be deeply fun and curiosity-provoking. 

In a recent workshop, I had participants screen-share a famous piece of art. Then people in the workshop had to run around their house and grab different objects to recreate that work, as a group, in gallery view (i.e., Brady Bunch view). You can’t do that if you’re meeting in person in a conference room or a classroom.

The world around you is a phenomenal tool for connection. I might ask you, for example, to leave your Zoom box and go grab an object that represents a part of who you are. You could also grab an object that represents something you love to do. 

Our brains are actually wired to take in visual and experiential data and encode it into long-term memory. As a result, your group will be more likely to remember that moment.

3. Move 

Get out of your virtual jail cell, and move. That’s harsh language, but typically when we meet virtually, a couple of dynamics are happening. 

One, we have the world’s most phenomenal autofocus camera device in our head: our eyes. But what do we do? When we’re meeting remotely, we stare at a bright screen 20 inches away from our faces. It’s letting our eyes atrophy, giving us headaches and contributing to an overall sense of fatigue.

Moving away from your screen allows your eyes to readjust. Invite people to break away. They can search around for an object that ties into the next part of the meeting, stretch or go for a walk. Take breaks to move around.

You can also create movement on the screen. One of my favorite exercises—as a warmup or coming back to a meeting—is inviting people to move and mirror what you’re doing. You can do this in grid view. If you move to the left of your screen, they move to the left. If you move to the right, they move to the right. Moving and mirroring each other creates an element of fun.

Bonus Tip: Ask for Visual Cues

When you meet in person, you can hear the laughter and side conversations. You can see the nonverbal cues as well. But in most virtual platforms, everybody’s on mute. It’s decent etiquette but it also creates an empty vacuum of silence. You’re left with only nonverbal cues. The issue is that deep engagement sometimes looks like a bunch of people blankly staring at the screen. I think about this whenever I’m doing a presentation or leading a virtual meeting because attendees are subconsciously taking in that same, boring nonverbal data from the group.

That’s why I make it a point to ask people for visual cues about every five to 15 minutes. I might say, “On a scale of I’m doing really phenomenal and you’re getting what you need from this meeting (thumbs-up) to this meeting should have been an email (thumbs-down), where are you at?”

Invite people to use visual cues. That could be a thumbs-up, thumbs-down or clapping. I specifically ask people to do this over video, rather than using the clapping hands emoji or hitting the like button. There’s something about actually physically gesturing that creates a little bit of fun and engagement in that moment.

Take It One Change at a Time

Erik Tyler, a friend and mentor of mine, says “Start from where you are, not from where you wish you were.” We all wish that our virtual meetings were remarkably engaging and super-fun. Start small, experiment with some things, see how the group responds, and go from there.

And ask your team: What is something that amazes you? This is a really great question to pose as an unofficial start to a meeting. You can have people answer in the chat. It’s a great way to kick off the meeting. You start in a place of amazement—which is a fun way to connect right away—rather than going straight into the agenda.