How To Keep Zoom Calls Engaging

“Highly engaged employees make customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.” – Timothy R. Clark

Video conferencing is simply the easiest and most effective way of allowing your teams, suppliers, and clients to meet in a safe environment.

And apart from the social distancing requirements necessitated by the pandemic, there are so many reasons why remote working… well… works! According to Hubspot, 77% of remote workers report higher productivity levels when working from home; 74% of employees say they’re less likely to leave a company that offers remote work; 83% of the workforce says that being able to work from home would increase job satisfaction.

But with social interaction at a bare minimum, employees in multiple Zoom or Teams meetings a day may be beginning to dread yet another boring online appointment.

We’ve come up with some ways to make online meetings more engaging by creating a little competition to up the month-end energy levels and go into the new month feeling more motivated.

A test of creativity

Everyone wants to be on holiday right now. So why not put everyone’s Photoshopping skills to the test and ask them to edit themselves onto a photo of where they would most like to be vacationing?

Hey, maybe someone else’s idea of vacation is simply where the kids aren’t. You could give a prize to the best and worst imaginary holidays.

A dress-up game

Home is where your themed-party accessories live, and just because we’re not having themed parties right now doesn’t mean they can’t be put to good use.

Have everyone dress up their pets, children, partners, or housemates based on yearly holidays. Best dress-up wins!

What’s cooking?

There are so many options for this one! You could all decide on one recipe to cook, with everyone preparing it to their liking in their respective homes and taking a photo to submit to the competition.

Or each month, one person submits the recipe of their favorite meal for everyone else in the team to cook. The employee whose photo best resembles the original meal wins that round.

Counting steps

Perhaps this option is better to measure over a weekend (or even better, the entire month) so that working hours aren’t spent walking up and down the house. But implementing a simple step-counting competition will keep everyone active and endorphins flowing. Who knows, maybe someone will climb the equivalent of Mt. Everest on their own flight of stairs!

You can choose to have a dedicated monthly competition or simply add an extra five minutes at the end of regularly scheduled meetings. Create even more engagement by sending out voting polls mid-month to keep employees waiting in anticipation for the announcement to be made.

And what’s a competition without a little reward? Make the stakes even higher by providing a gift card to each month’s winner.

“If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you – like a fever.” – Sam Walton