Calendar of Events

Linda Howard presents: Zoning Out? Or Zooming In? How Stakeholder Engagement Helps You Manage Risk in Virtual Meetings

• Have you noticed that you easily pay attention in some virtual meetings while others put you to sleep?
• How often do you tune out or check your email during an online meeting?
• What is the real impact of meetings where attendees feel disengaged and start zoning out?

Whether you are hosting a virtual event or attending one, making an online meeting engaging is critically important to achieving the goals of the event.

When you are the meeting host, you are designing and conducting online meetings to achieve a specific objective.  You may want to educate or inform your attendees, raise awareness of or build consensus around a particular issue, or provide a forum for distributed team members to develop a solution to a problem.  Each meeting has a particular goal or objective. But when attendees are not able to or not interested in participating in the event, those objectives will not be met.

Similarly, if we take our time to attend a meeting to learn something new, to participate in a discussion around a topic, or to troubleshoot or problem-solve an issue, we want the meeting to keep us engaged. When we find ourselves zoning out instead of zooming in on the subject, all we want to do is sign off!

In this session, we’ll focus on how to plan more engagement into our meetings in advance, whether it’s a brief team meeting or a longer workshop or event, so we can keep our attendees engaged and minimize the risks to meeting our objectives.

Learning Objectives – Participants will:

• Identify key risks of virtual meetings
• Explore what it means to engage our attendee stakeholders during a virtual meeting
• Learn key strategies to keep attendees from tuning out during virtual meetings and events
• Have some fun!

Linda Howard, PMP, CMC is the priciple of Howard Consulting, LLC (howardconsulting.com). She says: "In 2020, I spent most of my time helping nonprofits pivot from in-person to online events and meetings.  Going online is quite the struggle for some organizations, but in this new world of physical distancing, even organizations where most of their mission requires in-person work, there is a need for online collaboration, meetings, and events."