meetingpulse ebook: original version

The text below was created by a content marketing firm in San Francisco. I was asked to heavily edit this text, which ultimately became a rewrite. Errors represented by the text below include inconsistent formatting, incorrect grammar, illogical lists, unclear storytelling, incorrect use of prepositions, incorrect use of punctuation, lack of citations, and repetition of content. The text doesn't flow and is generally difficult to comprehend.

The Ultimate Guide to Using Meeting Software to Improve Employee Engagement

As organizations adapt to the needs of the modern workforce, the traditional company meeting has taken a hit. Gatherings have become a source of frustration for leadership and their teams, as an inefficient forum where the same, isolated few speak up to join the discussion, voice opinions, or ask questions. Other employees may express their views on relevant topics by sending an email afterwards or talking over the water cooler. But the value of this contribution is limited once the moment has passed, the group has disbanded, and employees have moved on to other projects. Teams begin to dread company meetings as a waste of time, where the only gains made are improved scores on their mobile gaming apps.

The cause of this frustration is clear: The 20th Century approach to company meetings and employee engagement strategies won’t get the job done in the 21st Century. Today’s organizations need solutions that bring employees together and encourage feedback. For maximum engagement, businesses must make meetings a two-way exchange, and move away from the one-sided scenario of presenter-listener.

We’ve prepared “The Ultimate Guide to Using Meeting Software to Improve Employee Engagement” to help companies transition to a conversational, participatory meeting experience. The information should also be useful for organizations that have already taken steps to increase employee engagement and want to fine-tune their efforts. This eBook covers:

Employee engagement: What it is and why it’s important
The downside of traditional employee engagement tools
How all-hands meetings are effective for engagement
The importance of measuring sentiment and taking transparent questions in real time
Different tools and methods for engagement during company meetings
Best practices for polls, surveys, and questions
How to analyze real time sentiment to measure success

1. Employee Engagement Overview: By definition, employee engagement is the emotional commitment a worker invests in an organization and its goals. An engaged employee cares about their contribution to a company; a paycheck or promotion are secondary to the work an employee performs to reach company goals.

Employee Engagement is Critical: Discretionary effort is what sets apart and engaged employee from one who focuses on other motivations. A worker will go the extra mile when the boss isn’t even watching to fulfill a sense of accomplishment.

Plus, engaged employees drive business results. Studies have shown that companies focusing on engagement experience higher net profit margins and higher shareholder returns over time. This is because employee engagement is also central to productivity. It’s estimated that an apathetic workforce costs US companies between $450–550 billion per year in accidents, absenteeism, and other inefficiencies.

Employee Engagement in Today’s Environment: A positive, satisfying environment is an employment perk that attracts the best workers and keeps them around. In today’s environment, talent retention ranks currently among the top two priorities among business leaders. Engagement serves to set your organization apart from others in a world where competition for talent is extremely fierce, leading companies to focus on employee engagement to enhance the workplace culture.

Cultivating that constructive culture is no easy task, however. Business owners, managers, and stakeholders must maintain open communication with all employees to enhance engagement. They must collect and assess feedback, identify problem areas, and pinpoint solutions for the benefit of all team members. Traditionally, organizations have implemented employee engagement tools through human resources departments, but this approach does have its drawbacks.

2. Standard Employee Engagement Tools: Many companies’ best practices have been to entrust employee engagement to the human resources department. This approach doesn’t meet the needs of today’s organizations for a number of reasons.

Traditional Approach to Employee Engagement Tools: For more than 30 years, companies have been dedicated to the concept for the engagement survey. Today, there are hundreds of survey providers offering validated data collection and measurement tools intended to assess engagement – for individual employees and the entire workforce. HR typically issues these periodic surveys annually, in connection with employee performance reviews. They could take the form of polls, questions, direct feedback, and other methods.

The Downside: While the motivation behind the engagement survey is respectable, the approach has its pitfalls. The process simply doesn’t keep up: As mentioned, it’s a 20th Century strategy that doesn’t deliver in the 21st Century.

These surveys lack the detail necessary to make sense of the data collected, so they don’t take into account all of the work-related issues that accurately measure commitment. They’re also not in real time, so they lack focus, relevance, and timeliness. Plus, they allow for identification of the employee responding to the survey, thus eliminating the possibility of obtaining truly honest feedback from employees.

Clearly, changes are needed to transition employee engagement from an annual HR task to an ongoing, comprehensive business initiative.

3. Town Hall Meetings – A New Approach to Increase Engagement

Companies must leave the periodic engagement strategy behind to embrace a new way of measuring sentiment. As many issues in the workplace stem from problems with communication, the town hall meeting format overcomes the communication challenges. This approach delivers value by making employees feel informed and giving them the opportunity to contribute.

A key benefit of town hall gatherings is that they retain audience attention better than other formats. Humans instinctively see body language and facial expressions as an open door for two-way communication. Studies show that a mere 23 percent of attendees pay full attention to audio, while that number climbs to 55 percent in interactive meetings.

Building Company Culture: The town hall style meeting is preferable to other formats because it unifies attendees. There’s less chance of confusion or misunderstanding, which contributes to acceptance of the speaker’s message. The end result is enhanced comprehension of the company mission, goals, and future.
Transparency in Company Meetings: Town hall meetings build trust within an organization because the presenter’s credibility is on full display. Plus, when given the opportunity to ask questions and provide input, employees feel they contribute to an organization’s decisions. Leadership has numerous channels for accessing data from the top down, but the town hall provides a channel for the rank and file workforce to deliver valuable input from the bottom up.
Enhancing Community: A town hall meeting serves to blur the boundaries between leadership and the teams they manage. Two-way communication makes all attendees part of the conversation rather than one of the nameless faces listening to a presentation.

4. The Case for Real Time Interaction at Company Meetings: While the benefits of two-way conversation make the case for a town hall meeting style, there’s still room for improvement. You can improve upon the format by implementing employee engagement solutions that allow for real time interaction between presenters, organizers, and attendees.

Instantly Measure Company Sentiment: Instant feedback reflects audience sentiment while they’re attending a meeting, so you know what’s working and what isn’t – for the current meeting and future events. Employees are much more likely to respond while they’re in a session rather than by email or paper survey afterwards.
Transparent Q&A Sessions Maximize Engagement: If you’re not giving your employees a platform for real-time Q&A participation in a meeting while it’s taking place, you’re missing out on the conversation. Team members are more engaged when they know they’re being heard now, and can see how others are responding.
Additional Advantages to a Real Time, Interactive Approach
Improve Learning: If the focus of your meeting is training, real time solutions can help organizers gauge how well attendees are grasping the content. Presenters tend to breeze through concepts they understand, but real time audience feedback can let them know more explanation is necessary. For businesses with educational requirements, the technology can help with tracking for compliance purposes.
More FUN: Gamification appeals to your employees’ competitive streak, so real time quizzes and games make meetings more fun.

5. Solutions for Engaging Employees During Company Meetings: Employee engagement solutions help organizations tackle typical meeting challenges by gathering real time data and insights. The interactive experience starts when a meeting organizer uses the employee engagement software to issue poll, survey, or quiz questions. Attendees receive the information through their mobile device or another audience response system, and submit their reply. With a browser-based solution, meeting attendees simply click the link provided with the software and indicate their choice. There’s no need to download software in advance or train participants on how to use it. Plus, employees can access the link via any internet-enabled device, giving them the choice of smartphone, tablet, or computer to vote.

6. Audience Response Device Options

To gather data from meeting attendees, your employee engagement software must incorporate a device for each individual to communicate a response. An audience response system connects the presenter with team members, so they can contribute to the discussion rather than simply listen.

Clickers: This technology is similar to a remote control to allow interaction between presenters and group members. Meeting organizers prepare the content, then delivers it to the clicker and guides the crowd to respond to polls or surveys, either through multiple choice questions or typing answers to open-ended inquiries. Attendees can also ask questions.
Smartphones and Other Mobile Devices: The latest audience response technology allows meeting participants to contribute via their own mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers. This approach has a number of advantages, while still maintaining the functionality of traditional clicker system.
Companies must invest in clickers that are compatible with the meeting software, and these devices can be expense.
Clickers can be lost or damaged, and often require firmware updates to keep them compatible.
Your meeting attendees already have a smartphone, tablet, or computer, so all that’s needed for the mobile software app is internet access.
Your employees don’t need training on how to use their own mobile device or computer.

7. Browser-Based Solutions for Company Meetings

There are different ways of collecting responses to questions, polls, and surveys during company meetings. Browser-based solutions and text messaging applications are two common approaches to audience response systems.

Benefits of Browser-Based Interaction Solutions: There are a number of pitfalls in using text message polling for company meetings, and the advantages of a browser-based version are clear.
There’s nothing to download or install: To respond to a question, meeting attendees simply click the link provided with the browser-based solution and indicate their choice. There’s no need to download software in advance or train participants on how to use it. Plus, employees can access the link via any internet-enabled device, giving them the choice of smartphone, tablet, or computer to vote.
The application is always up to date: Developers of browser-based audience response solutions take care of all updates, maintenance, and security patches, ensuring the application is always current. The users accessing the solution to vote and the meeting organizers are all using the same, compatible software version.
Text messaging may cost attendees: Not all employees attending a company meeting have unlimited texting, and will be charged for messages over the designated number. Team members may be discouraged from providing an answer for fear that they’ll see extra charges on their next phone bill.
There’s no need for dedicated IT support: With browser-based company meeting solutions, all users access the system in the same environment: their web browser. This makes development of meeting polls and surveys easy for meeting organizers, without the need for IT support. Meetings take place within a single operating system, so there’s no requirement to test other environments to ensure compatibility.
Browser-based means it’s accessible anywhere, anytime: As long as they have internet access, employees attending a company meeting will have access to a browser-based solution. This arrangement enables organizers to deliver polling questions to users via their smartphone, tablet, or computer – and receive answers through the same route – no matter where in the world employees may be participating from.

Real Time Information: While the above benefits are logistical in nature, there is a critical advantage of browser-based audience response systems: Responses are delivered in real time for review by company meeting organizers, employees, business partners, and anyone else participating. The importance of real time information cannot be overstated:

In-the-Moment Responses: Instant feedback reflects audience sentiment while they’re attending a meeting, so you know what’s working and what isn’t – for the current meeting and future events. Employees are much more likely to respond while they’re in a session rather than by email or paper survey afterwards.
Maximize Engagement: If you’re not giving your employees a platform for real-time participation in a meeting while it’s taking place, you’re missing out on the conversation. Team members are more engaged when they know they’re being heard now, and can see how others are responding.

8. Using Polls and Questions to Gather Key Data During Company Meetings: The technology behind your approach to interactive, engaging company meetings is just one piece of the puzzle. You also need to solicit the right information to obtain actionable results.

Once you recognize the importance of engaging employees through real-time, interactive meeting experiences, using browser-based solutions, you still need to create the content. Developing polls and surveys, and gathering employee sentiment isn’t as easy as throwing a few questions together and hoping for the best.

Setting Up Audience Response Solutions: Top companies implementing polls and surveys for use during company meetings need technology that’s easy to use, provides proper security, and delivers accurate results. Therefore, look to features such as:
Authentication methods to ensure that only permitted employees have access to ballots, questions, and surveys
Flexibility to allow users to access content through any internet-enabled device, including smartphone, tablet, or computer
Encryption options and audit trails for security purposes
Intuitive interfaces so there’s no training involved for employees or meeting organizers
Poll and survey templates for repeated use: you don’t want to reinvent the wheel for every meeting.
Reporting tools for recordkeeping and tracking.
Asking the Right Poll Questions: Targeted, specific questions are best for polls to ensure accuracy. Use simple multiple choice formats, such as asking for a response on a scale of 1-5, a yes/no, or levels of agreement/disagreement with a statement. Other tips for using polls in a company meeting include:
Keep the questions short, and make sure response options are clear.
Focus on one topic at a time, rather than trying to combine concepts.
Make sure questions are balanced to avoid bias. Some audience response solutions allow you to shuffle response options to change the order that answers appear.
Setting and Sticking to an Agenda: Establish an agenda before scheduling the meeting, and make sure to take on one issue at a time. You should avoid working from a comprehensive outline, as the information you solicit will be general in nature and not useful in measuring sentiment.

Send the agenda to meeting attendees in advance so they have time to think about the topics to be covered and plan their contribution. It’s not necessary to include the exact poll questions with the meeting invitation; rather, you should include the agenda to establish a framework for the discussion. During the meeting, make sure to stick to the agenda as much as possible. Tangential conversations may provide fodder for future meetings, but it’s important to stay focused on the topic at hand.

Measuring Success Over Time: Employee engagement solutions include analytics tools that collect the data and process it, thereby giving the full story behind the numbers. The technology enables you to identify trends and detect problems with employee engagement, from which you can glean workforce sentiment. Employee engagement software also provides reporting tools for recordkeeping and tracking, allowing you to measure performance of your initiatives.
Other Best Practices for Polls and Surveys: The technology behind your approach to interactive, engaging company meetings is just one piece of the puzzle. You also need to solicit the right information to obtain actionable results.
Keep the questions short, and make sure response options are clear.
Focus on one topic at a time, rather than trying to combine concepts.
Make sure questions are balanced to avoid bias. Some audience response solutions allow you to shuffle response options to change the order that answers appear.
Use simple multiple choice formats, such as asking for a response on a scale of 1-5, a yes/no, or levels of agreement/disagreement with a statement.

9. Engaging Your Employees via Question and Answer Session

In order for an employee to feel valued, it is important for them to feel that their voice is heard and that their contribution is valuable. Companies leading in the area of employee engagement hold regular question and answer sessions with their employees, where every type of question is encouraged, and all opinions are valued. This is not always easy: is the leadership if the business ready to really engage and answer the difficult questions? However, studies show that this is especially important for the millennial generation, who are quickly becoming the majority of the workforce. These younger workers place a lot of value on feeling like they are an important part of the enterprise, and not just a mute part of the machine.

Here are some best practices when deploying regular question and answer sessions as part of an employee engagement program:

Follow-Up

If employees take the time to ask and begin to discuss a question, they need to be sure that they will get an answer and their concerns will be followed up. Otherwise, what can be an exercise in motivation and engagement can turn into a de-motivator instead. Make sure you answer all questions, and make time to follow up. If questions are left over from a meeting, there should be a mechanism to answer them offline or after the meeting.

Measure the outcome

If questions result in an initiative or change, make sure there is measurement and post-mortem analysis of any initiatives that result from the employee discussion. Making regular, honest, predictable post-mortem analysis makes it easier for your employees to accept an initiative whether they may not fully agree with the decision.

Anonymity

Allow anonymous submission of questions. Our experience shows that anonymity is powerful in getting your employees’ real concerns out in the open. You want to talk about the elephants in the room, and honestly address any demotivating factors that may influence your employees.

Seeding the questions

When you are just starting up your town hall schedule or employee engagement program, consider anonymously asking some really difficult questions yourself. This will show the others that it’s really okay to ask intelligent, difficult questions and set the standard for engagement in the meetings to come.

CONCLUSION

“The Ultimate Guide to Using Meeting Software to Improve Employee Engagement” is intended to inform company owners, managers, and stakeholders on why employee engagement is critical in the workplace. Retention strategies are at the forefront of business concerns, and they’re reliant upon creating a happy, satisfied environment that employees are thrilled to call their work home.

We’ve also pointed out strategies and best practices to keep your team engaged during company meetings. An audience response system should be part of your organization’s approach to company meetings, to generate employee input and gauge satisfaction – or dissatisfaction. Only by gaining access to this information can companies address leadership issues, implement appropriate changes, and boost engagement among employees.

However, not all audience response systems are created equally. MeetingPulse checks all the boxes for live audience solutions that companies of all sizes can use to make meetings an engaging, two-way experience:

· It operates within a browser, so there’s nothing to download, maintain, and update.

· There’s no hardware investment, because audience members participate via their own smartphone, tablet, or computer, through a short link you provide.

· MeetingPulse includes engagement features for conducting polls and distributing surveys, and gathering information that’s critical to maintaining a satisfied workforce.

· Meeting attendees can access the solution anytime, anywhere with internet access.

· The solution is developed with a focus on security, with encryption options and authentication methods to ensure accuracy.

· MeetingPulse technology is built with simplicity in mind, with customizable options available to fit your meeting needs.

· MeetingPulse can be configured to allow anonymous submission of questions.

· The solution incorporates reporting and analytics tools to help give meaning to the data you’re collecting.

· As a browser-based solution, MeetingPulse gathers poll, survey, and other responses in real time, so presenters and the audience can review results as they’re being submitted.

MeetingPulse is proven to help meeting organizers respond to real time sentiment, take polls, and engage like never before during company meetings: Our technology has increased engagement for our customers – which include companies of all sizes – as much as 350%.

Please contact us for more information on our technology, or sign up to receive blog updates and other informative resources.