5 Reasons to Make Meetings More Fun

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Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

The average person spends more time in meetings than they’d like to. The average manager spends the majority of their workday in meetings. Given these facts, it isn’t surprising that you can read lots of books, articles and tips about running and managing meetings more effectively. Seldom will you read that you should make your meetings more fun.

Meetings can be very daunting. For many organizers, the question of how to get the best out of the meetings is always the big deal. On top of the overwhelming nature of business meetings, they can also be very costly both financially and physically.

It has become clear that, we have to avoid boring, unfocused, wasteful and frustrating meetings. Avoid them like a plague. In this article I will give you five reasons why you should purposefully inject more fun into your meetings.

1. Increase engagement

Let me state the obvious. People like things that are fun. They engage mentally and emotionally in things they are enjoying. Ask yourself: Would you like people to be more fully engaged in your next meeting? Do you want people to be more mentally involved in the problem you are solving or the issue you are discussing?

You’ve brought people together to benefit from their presence, not for them to fill a seat. Making your meetings more fun will increase their engagement in the meeting and help you produce better outcomes.

Meetings that avoid a classroom settings increase engagement of the participants. As opposed to having one individual lecturing the participants, even the seating arrangement should be restructured to allow for face-to-face contact with all members and discussions be interactive.

2. Increase communication

You can’t take advantage of people’s knowledge and experience if they don’t share it. Including an element of fun in your meetings will get people more comfortable with speaking up and sharing their ideas.

Meetings that ensure that all participants can readily take part in the discussions will inevitably increase communication. This is the key to every successful meeting. Facilitators must always guide the discussions as opposed to lecturing.

3. Increase energy

How many meetings have you attended where the energy level feels like it is at zero? People’s minds are elsewhere or on other projects. People aren’t interested in the topic of the meeting. People don’t understand why they are there. And all of this shows up in somber, lifeless body language and effort.

Of course there are many ways to remedy this besides injecting fun into your meetings, but fun is still a wonderful tool to improve the energy level and attention to the meeting topics. Open and interactive meetings will increase energy in the room and that means more synergy. This will keep participants focused and engaged.

4. Improve relationships

When meetings are interactive, they allow for improvement on relationships amongst the participants. During business meetings, the goal must also be more connectivity amongst the staff members. If people know each other better and are more comfortable with the others in the meeting, they will more likely share their ideas.

So anything we can do to improve the relationships between people is a positive step. Does this mean that everyone in a meeting needs to be best friends? Of course not! What it does mean is that as people know each other better they will be more open to the ideas of others and more willing to share their own. Fun can make all of this happen.

5. Increase memory and retention

We remember things that are more enjoyable longer. When we make our meetings more fun, we increase people’s ability to remember the content and remember the decisions. People are likely going to absorb information in such environments than within rigid, top-down meetings where they have no say over the meeting content..

When people remember the meeting’s events better it improves the likelihood that they will complete their action items, share the results of the meeting more accurately with others and much more.

Conclusion

The five reasons above are excellent in themselves. But beyond them individually, the overriding reason to make your meetings more fun is that they will be more productive. We have meetings to get people with different opinions, perspectives and experiences working together.

Our whole purpose in doing this is to create valuable outcomes. When we can find ways to make the investment of time and energy for all of those involved more productive, we should implement these ways!

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Teboho Polanka
Teboho is a Social Worker, Writer and Inspirational Speaker. He is in pursuit of MSc. in Managerial Psychology. Graduates are able to apply psychological principles and methods to tackle challenges in the work environment and provide effective practical solutions. Acting as industrial-organizational psychologists.