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.

Another way to make meetings more engaging is to change the physical context of the meeting room, such as by moving the meeting table from the center of the room to the side of the room or having all participants stand. Alternatively, you could conduct walking meetings or declare the meeting laptop- and screen-free. Such changes disrupt the usual pattern, which can refresh participants’ minds and increase alertness.

Publicly available employee manuals from progressive companies can give you additional ideas on freshening up meetings.

While it can be exciting to experiment, keep in mind the various personality types within the group when you try something new. Also, remember that any new meeting practice will eventually become old. Regularly reflect on which practices are effective and which are not, and strive to identify a pattern of what works best with your team.

2. Address the elephant in the room.

When people avoid discussing difficult topics in meetings — perhaps out of fear of conflict or discomfort with the power dynamics — tensions will rise. Consider, for example, a team that struggles to make decisions and cracks jokes during meetings to avoid the issue at hand each time a decision must be made: Problems or concerns remain unaddressed, potentially leading to bigger issues later on, and the team struggles to move forward.

For leaders, addressing the emotional impact this behavior is having on the meeting without blaming others is important. The leader can voice their own frustration to dissipate the tension and open a conversation. This can also deepen the connections within the team. To get the job done, you might need to incorporate a conversational device or even a physical prop.

At one consumer goods company, for example, team members agreed that whenever anyone sensed an unaddressed concern, they’d raise their hand and announce, “Elephant in the room.” To underscore this approach, the team even bought a plush pink elephant to place on the meeting table. Deliberately spotlighting this behavior and highlighting a desired action helped to disarm team members and pave a path toward action.

Some serious topics may require different interventions to encourage other people to express themselves. To encourage discussion of the challenges women face progressing on their career paths, services firm KPMG worked with artists. Based on interviews, the artists developed a theatrical lecture on the firm’s workplace culture, work-life balance, career prerequisites for women, and alpha male behaviors. This unconventional communication channel helped teams recognize prejudices and develop a better understanding of a challenging topic.

For these approaches to work, leaders must create psychological safety, or an environment in which people feel safe to take risks, share ideas, and express themselves without fearing negative consequences. Leaders can achieve this in part by setting meeting principles with their teams to ensure that everyone feels comfortable participating in the discussion.

3. Make everyone feel heard.

People want to know that their opinions matter. If meeting attendees don’t feel this way, managers may notice silence or frequent interruptions, nonverbal cues like sighing and eye-rolling, or minimal responses to questions. Designing an inclusive meeting agenda ensures that participants feel valued and have an opportunity to contribute.

Managers can create inclusive meetings by using tactics like asking participants to write their views on Post-it notes before starting a discussion on a topic, or having someone summarize the previous speaker’s point before adding their input. This gives participants time to reflect and articulate their thoughts clearly and equalizes participation. True listening goes beyond waiting for your turn to speak — it involves empathizing, understanding the speaker’s perspective, and managing personal and group biases.

Though it might feel counterintuitive, building in moments of silence also helps meeting participants listen to the words spoken and digest the emotions, intentions, and unspoken nuances. I once facilitated a session that had a tense start, with frequent interruptions and conflicting perspectives. Introducing a moment of shared silence sparked a revelation: As team members reflected on the opposing views, they discovered common ground buried beneath their differences, fostering newfound unity and clarity of purpose.

In discussions where a majority opinion faces some opposition, don’t aim to convince or overrule the minority. Instead, ask, “What can we learn from this viewpoint?” Often, the minority view holds wisdom.

This approach led to breakthroughs in one retailer’s management team, which sought to understand the minority opinion and leverage the group’s insights. Surprisingly, leaders found more agreement than anticipated, and the wisdom within the minority opinion added depth. Considering multiple viewpoints might temporarily slow discussions, but it also boosts engagement and improves the final decision.

4. Respect your company’s DNA.

How you engage employees in meetings should align with your organization’s DNA — its deeply rooted strengths and core values. Root strengths are skills and personality traits, such as resilience, while core values are guiding principles and beliefs, such as fairness. Ideally, your company DNA can be captured in three to five words, with each word accompanied by a sentence or two explaining its specific meaning to the organization. Many companies struggle to identify distinctive and specific values and bring them to life.

Articulating the company’s DNA informs the do’s and don’ts of your meetings and helps your meetings resonate better with employees. What might initially appear to be resistance to a certain meeting practice could actually be a response to a practice that doesn’t match your company’s DNA.

Software company GitLab, for example, defines its core value of transparency as being “open about as many things as possible.” Almost all company information — from the status of goals and projects to its handbook and infrastructure details — is available to all employees and, often, to the public. This transparency reduces uncertainty, minimizes anxiety, and helps employees understand context. GitLab demonstrates its core value of transparency in meetings by recording them so they’re accessible to everyone in the company, unless they contain highly confidential information. Additionally, meeting discussions and outcomes are tracked in a shared document. In practice, most employees will just read the shared document to learn the main points and outcomes of the meeting, but they have the option to watch the entire recording — the ultimate example of transparency.

Using your company’s core values and root strengths to establish explicit do’s and don’ts for meetings and involve everyone in the process will foster meeting practices that respect and leverage your organization’s unique DNA.

The benefits of actively engaging people in meetings are far-reaching. Meeting engagement contributes not only to a team’s success but also to the leader’s: A leader who focuses on this work can gain new skills, internal visibility, and chances for advancement.

By shaking up the usual, addressing the elephant in the room, making everyone feel heard, and respecting your company’s DNA, you can transform meetings from apathetic to energetic. These strategies may require you to confront challenging structural issues and team dynamics. It will also take some trial and error to find what works and resonates with your team. The benefits, however, are undeniable: a productive, engaged, and connected team. You’ll see an improvement in meeting outcomes, and you might even find that meetings stop feeling like a chore.

“The MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management.”

Please visit the firm link to site