Keeping people’s attention and influencing your audience in online meetings

Hands up if COVID-19 saw you suddenly thrown into online meetings with little or no training?

You’re not alone. The role of meeting chair can be a tough one, with or without adding virtuality.

It can be challenging to encourage participants to engage with you, to move past awkward silences when posing questions to your team and making sure you were heard or understood.

Three simple ways to influence your audience when hosting online meetings:

To better influence your audience to listen to your ideas, to participate actively or persuade them to action, remember these three easy tips.

1. Look directly into the camera

It feels natural to want to look at your audience but staring at the camera will help you to influence and engage them.

This will give the impression that you are making eye contact with your audience and will help you to build rapport and authority

2. Encourage participants to have their cameras on

It seems to have become the norm to turn off cameras in online meetings, but having cameras on in online meetings can be a breath of fresh air.

Seeing audience reactions and reading non-verbal cues are useful strategies in both online and face to face meetings.

As the host, you should encourage all participants to use their camera if possible (within bandwidth restrictions, camera availability and home office privacy concerns).

3. Encourage use of the chat function

You may find in some meetings that everyone wants to talk at once.

Those who are less assertive may miss their moment to speak, discussions may be unproductive or important information missed.

Encourage use of online tools such as the chat function to support inclusive participation.

Be sure to monitor the chat or ask someone to do that on your behalf so that you can focus on the discussion.

If you don’t have time to address everything in the chat during the meeting, copy it and follow up later.

Are you a Zoom Meeting Host wanting more strategies to enhance performance and outcomes?

Contact me for a session to learn more public speaking strategies to help your meeting shine.