How to Keep a Remote Team Engaged
How to Keep a Remote Team Engaged
Five Closing Exercises to Wrap Up and Stay Connected
Often meetings just end. We don’t have a plan. We just break up and move onto the next thing, and it’s not great for engagement. That’s why in this chapter, I want to focus on closing exercises.
This is often a way to signal at the end of one meeting, what the next meeting will be like. It can serve as motivation as well as providing an idea of what’s to come. If you end one meeting feeling stressed, overwhelmed, burnt out and unmotivated, you’re unlikely to feel energized, alive and creative going into the next meeting.
Taking a page out of Stephen Covey’s popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the best way to engage a remote team is to “begin with the end in mind.”
Closing Exercises to Keep Your Team Connected
You might be wondering, where did these closing exercises come from? I didn’t just randomly create them while crossing my fingers and hoping they would work.
I get to consult with and lead workshops for some of the most innovative universities and organizations on the planet, and one of my current clients is the National 4-H Council. I’m helping them design more engaging training sessions and education materials to develop young leaders.
While meeting with their leadership, we went over closing exercises for training sessions. I brainstormed ideas from previous workshops I’ve led, having experimented with different ways to end meetings. We picked a list of really great closing exercises, and I want to share some of those with you.
Remembering What Happened First and Last
Another reason I want to focus on closing exercises has everything to do with how we learn. We tend to remember what happens first and last in a given session or class. Psychologists call this the Primacy/Recency Effect.
Now, imagine that you’re used to rushing at the end of your meetings. You conclude by just hastily scheduling the next meeting or saying “gotta go” as you look for the “end meeting” button. A much better use of the last five minutes is to engage in intentional closing exercises. There are hundreds of ways to close with purpose. The important thing is that you do something other than a rushed “hard stop” or worse, continuing past the allotted time for who knows how long.
Below are five of my favorite exercises for wrapping up a meeting or gathering with purpose. Feel free to adapt this to best suit your needs and context.
1. Application Anchors
Let’s say you have a meeting, and after it ends, you have nothing you can apply from the meeting or no action steps you plan to take after it’s over. Well, I can tell you that meeting was a total bust.
To ensure action, a short exercise like this one can make your time together so much more productive.
Five minutes before ending the meeting, have your team break away from their computers. Ask everyone to step away from Zoom or whatever platform you’re on and find an object in their home or wherever they are. This should be something that represents one application they’re taking away from the meeting or an action step they want to take after the meeting.
For example, I keep a squishy, stress ball-like ear on my desk to remind me to listen better. Anyway, let’s say you find an object like this. You might say, as a leader, that you’re committing to being more deliberate about listening to team members before sharing your ideas.
The value in this kind of tangible exercise is that the brain is wired to encode visual data into long-term memory. A closing exercise like this is a powerful way to finish a meeting on a high note.
This way, everybody leaves the meeting with a visual cue of what they are committing to in the next week, month, quarter or semester.
2. Future Me
For this one, I’m going to take you to futureme.org. This beautiful site allows you to write a letter to your future self—digitally and for free.
It offers a really great way to close a meeting on a high note. Think about the next time your team is gathering. Let’s say that’s November 9. Go ahead and invite people to type a letter to be delivered on November 8—the day before the meeting. Write a letter that you would love to receive to get mentally prepared for that meeting. It could be something you want to tell yourself, or that you want to share with your team at your next meeting.
Besides meetings, this is perfect for online classes or remote learning. Schedule a letter filled with fresh takeaways and key points to be delivered the day before a test for example. If you are onboarding new team members, it’s a great exercise to have them write a letter after Day One to be delivered after their first full year of work.
Having people write a letter to themselves in the future is a brilliant way to crowdsource remote team engagement. As a leader, you don’t want to be the one pushing engagement. Instead, it’s best to create opportunities for the team to contribute and engage on their own terms.
Team members get to choose what they write, and when the letter is sent. You type in your email address at futureme.org. You don’t get added to some marketing list. You click “send to the future,” and voila—your message is queued up and waiting to be sent at the time you selected.
Now that you know about this, you’ll figure out a whole variety of ways to use it.
3. Question Quest
Meeting remotely, it’s likely you come together a bit less often and that more time elapses between each meeting. That leaves you with the challenge of figuring out how to carry momentum from one meeting to the next. This is a really great exercise for that.
It’s also a bit of a wordplay. The first part of the word question is, of course, quest. This exercise encourages people to formulate one question you’d like to consistently ask yourself until the next meeting. Then you go on a quest of sorts, seeking to answer that question.
In theory, a really good question allows you to explore possibilities. You journey, in a way, into unknown territory. You’re on a quest to uncover new ideas and perspectives and you make new connections with people.
Take this question, for example: What is something you know really well? What if you were to turn this question into a quest? Ask five colleagues to consider this question between now and your next meeting. If your entire group was to do that with a question of their own choosing, connection, learning and engagement would increase significantly.
Very simply, at the end of your virtual gathering, you can have team members formulate the questions they want to ask. These could be questions they seek answers to themselves or that others pursue. It’s a really lovely way to invite people into meaningful conversations.
The whole exercise only takes a couple minutes, and that’s all you need to engage your team. Then you can keep them connected until the next meeting.
Building on the first three exercises, the next two are called You Can Quote Me and Virtual Slideshow.
In regards to the first, we love quotes. These may be profound, pithy or humorous. A few powerful words can have a tremendous impact. For anyone who has felt utterly alone in their struggle or faced discrimination, for example, there’s this one from Mahatma Gandhi: “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” When somebody hears that at the right time in the right context, it can be very impactful.
We can learn a lot from listening to the wisdom of others. A single quote may inform the choices we make or even the direction we choose to go. One of my favorite quotes is from a mentor of mine who said, “A choice of words is often a choice of worlds.”
The first of the two closing exercises I want to share recognizes the impact quotes can have.
4. You Can Quote Me
The idea with this exercise is to flip the script. It’s not about reacting to a quote but saying something quotable.
My cofounder at We and Me, Will Wise, and I have noticed the impact quotes have on people in our work. Sharing a quote can spark meaningful conversation, increase critical thinking and raise engagement in a way that a simple prompt won’t. To leverage that, I created a deck of We! Engage Cards with quotes (and images) on them.
Frequently, we read quotes from people who are famous, well-known or an authority on a topic. Maybe they’ve written a book. There’s some reason they’re quoted. As such, we might think only certain high profile individuals, or dead people, can be quoted. The truth is there’s no reason that every member of your team can’t be quotable if that’s their intention.
That’s how I frame this closing exercise. I ask people if they can summarize the entire meeting we’ve just had in one quote. Then I invite them to do this by unmuting and sharing, putting their quote in chat on a virtual platform or jotting it down on a sticky note and holding that up to the screen.
The intention here is to sound wise, eloquent, witty or funny—whatever suits you. Just write down a quote that summarizes the meeting. It’s super simple, quick and powerful.
Sidenote: You Can Start Your Meeting With Most of These Exercises, Too
Although I’m framing these as closing exercises, many can become starter exercises as well. You just need to adapt them, make little changes or tweak the framing. Then kick off your meeting with these exercises to put connection over content.
You can also use these exercises as a kind of attention reset. This will help you move from a consumption model to a contributor mindset.
5. Virtual Slideshow
For this exercise, there’s actually no screen-sharing required. You won’t be doing a PowerPoint, using Google Slides or anything like that. Virtual Slideshow utilizes the speaker view feature in Zoom. With this platform, whoever is speaking shows up big on everyone’s screen.
You can tie this exercise into Application Anchors, described above. At the end of your meeting, you can have each team member “check out” by sharing something with the group.
Go alphabetically by first name so you don’t have to spend time deciding on the order, or let people share as they feel called to do so. Invite each group member to share, in speaker view, an intention. Have everyone hold up an object that relates to what they’re sharing.
You could have everybody grab an image that represents one takeaway from the meeting. Alternatively, team members could share an image that represents what they want to accomplish at the next meeting.
As they share, invite them to cover most of the screen with that object or image. In speaker view, it will look almost like a slide, and you have the team member live-narrating in the background. When that person is done, the next team member holds up their image or object and talks about what it represents to them to keep the Virtual Slideshow moving.
You can also ask each person to snap their fingers when they unmute and that’ll cue Zoom to make their screen big which adds a nice little audio transition.
If you’re used to being in gallery view, you know people just look like tiny pixelated boxes. Utilizing speaker view is a great way to increase a sense of connection and bring your team together.