5 Strategies for Keeping Your Team Engaged During All-Day Corporate Meetings

Read Time:4 Minute, 29 Second

Organizing a business event that lasts all day can be exorbitantly costly for a company, not due to the expenses related to the rent or food, but because of the unbelievable amount of collective human attention such an event consumes. Here are five ways to manage your employees’ attention in the same fashion a good CFO would manage an organization’s cash – guard it carefully, prevent any waste, and don’t assume it’s limitless.

Front-load the hard thinking

Many schedules are based on what is easy, rather than what is cognitively optimal. In the morning, prefrontal cortex is the most active as it has not been worn out by decisions or depletion caused by the day’s events. This is when you want to do work that requires deep thought. Stuff that requires strategic decision-making, creative, or harder reasoning – when the answer or quality really matters, should be done in the morning. Stuff that is status related or lighter content can be in the afternoon. This is not people being awkward this is just people at their best and worst.

Install hard stops every 90 minutes

Humans were not designed to sit still for long periods of time, and it’s not good for our bodies or our minds. But beyond how it makes us physically feel, long periods of sedentary attention can quickly kill engagement. The solution is to break up the meeting. Not optional. Not “if we have time.” Build in a hard stop every 90 minutes for a quick break.

These breaks don’t need to be long or complicated. A five-minute walk, a stretch, or a shift from sitting to standing can be plenty. Anything to get people out of passive mode. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index also found that back-to-back meetings can increase our brainwave patterns associated with stress and decrease our ability to focus as our day progresses. The science is solid on why we need biobreaks. Most facilitators just lack the discipline to implement them. These aren’t wasted minutes; they are the magic that allows the rest of the minutes to work.

Give everyone a voice, not just the loudest people

Out of 30 people, perhaps six will speak unless prompted. The other 24 are quietly concurring, checking out, or disagreeing and committing to whatever they think in private. That’s not psychological safety – that’s just polite.

Live polling tools and anonymous Q&A software rid us of that inhibiting dynamic. When anyone can simply tap out a question or vote on priorities via phone, interactivity shifts from social to democratic. The quiet, insightful analyst can finally be heard. The gregarious over-talker can still talk, but he or she doesn’t drown everyone else out. This is even more important with hybrid events where some people are on video – it’s one of the only ways to include electronically present participants in the meeting.

Control the sensory environment

The meeting room itself plays a role in whether or not your meeting will be productive. If the lighting is too dim, people will feel sleepy. If the room is too warm, people will become drowsy. Eating a lunch high in refined carbs will lead to an energy slump around 2pm, and no motivational speaker will be able to snap everyone out of it.

It’s not hard to make these fixes, but they seldom happen because people don’t think of these aspects as part of the meeting. Protein-rich food can be used instead of carb-heavy foods provided by your catering service. The room should be a bit cooler than you think is normal. If you have access to natural light, open the curtains! None of this will make your meeting excellent, but it can prevent it from crumbling in the afternoon.

Bring in an external voice for the afternoon stretch

The post-lunch slot is often the time during an all-day business event when many attendees are dreading having to sit through yet more technical information or strategic updates.

At this stage, you’ve been actively thinking and taking in information (a lot of it uninteresting but necessary for your job) for several hours. Your brain and stomach are crying out for a break.

This is when a well-chosen external voice can recharge everyone’s batteries. Bringing in motivational inspirational speakers serves a specific function at this point – not entertainment for its own sake, but a compelling story, an engaging presenter, and interactive elements that get everyone to sit up, take notice, and participate.

You want to give people the chance to disengage from their work and company in a low-stakes way for half an hour before they have to do it surreptitiously anyway. A chance to laugh, to be entertained.

And if the segment is facilitated well, this outside perspective can also provide a way to (collectively) voice concerns and criticise the current state of affairs without fear of internal backlash.

The point isn’t to make meetings longer – it’s to make them work

The reason most day-long meetings suck is not about where the breaks are scheduled, or how inspiring the facilitator is, or whether the coffee is good. It’s about how the day is divided. Some kinds of energy are simply going to drop for everyone after lunch, no matter the circumstances. So you can book accordingly, or you can waste time you were going to lose, anyway.