A NEW WAY TO INCREASE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: FIX YOUR MEETINGS

By Chelsea Mitamura, PhD

Do your employees often leave meetings with less vigor in their step than when they walked in? Do many of them look a little dazed or frustrated during the meeting itself? The answer to both these questions is probably yes. Despite the fact that employees in the U.S. spend more than a third of their time in meetings, research suggests that they only find about 50% of that time worthwhile. It’s no wonder people feel discouraged and prone to disengage when a new meeting is added to their calendar.

In fact, having to perpetually attend bad meetings can significantly reduce employees’ overall engagement – but employee engagement is hugely important for your bottom line.

Research shows that engaged employees are 38% more likely to have above average productivity.[1] Work units in the top quartile on employee engagement outperform bottom-quartile by 10% on customer ratings, 20% in sales and 21% in profitability.[2] And, companies that invest in and have better long-term employee engagement are listed 11.5 times as often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work, 2.1 times as often in Forbes’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and 4.5 times as often in LinkedIn’s List of North America’s Most In-Demand Employers.[3] There is no question that you want your employees as engaged as possible.

 So, if bad meetings are eating away at your employees’ engagement, one clear (but not obvious!) solution is to fix your meetings. If you can find a way to make your meetings genuinely effective, employees will come to see them as valuable assets rather than black holes of wasted time. Furthermore, if you can design meetings that are mutually interactive and productive, you can build employee engagement on a day-to-day basis.

Historically, this has been easier said than done, of course. Improving meeting effectiveness can be difficult and, until recently, no one was sure how to really improve meeting quality systematically. Now, however, a new app called ConvoLens – that brings together more than two decades of research on human interaction – can help you do just that.

Powered by Behavioral Analytics, a method of understanding peoples’ behavior during meetings, ConvoLens can help you pinpoint exactly what is going wrong in your meetings – and what is going right. It gives you the tools to quickly and easily understand how your employees interact during a meeting, and well-grounded suggestions for which behaviors to encourage. 

ConvoLens can help you craft more effective meetings, and that makes for more engaged – and productive – employees.

Want to learn more about ConvoLens and how it can help? Sign up for the free Beta trial.

[1] Dukes, M. (2016). Want a more productive workforce? Invest in these three things. Inc.

[2] Reilly, R. (2017). Five ways to improve employee engagement now. Gallup.

[3] Morgan, J. (2017). Why the millions we spend on employee engagement buy us so little. Harvard Business Review.