It’s a question we hear all the time: “How can I get my team to speak up more in our meetings?”
Lackluster participation in meetings is frustrating for the facilitator and wastes everyone’s time. Fortunately, some small changes can often make a huge difference.
Here are five reliable ways to increase participation in your meetings—whatever the topic, whoever your participants are, and whether your meetings are virtual or in-person.
1. Start with why (and how)
Have a clear purpose with a clear reason why each participant is necessary to achieve that purpose. Briefly frame the meeting at the start with the why and how of the meeting.
People feel like they have too many meetings on their calendars. Don’t assume they know why they’re in a particular meeting and how to contribute to it.
For example, you might start a meeting to review a draft of a new marketing page with something like: “Thanks for coming, everyone. We’re here to review the latest version of the content for our XYZ landing page. In a moment, Jane will provide some context and share the work-in-progress. And then, we’ll ask everyone to weigh in about any clarifying questions you have, what you particularly like, and what opinions or advice you’d offer to improve the next draft. You’re each here because you have a unique perspective in your role, so we’re eager to hear from everyone.”
2. Treat silence as data
Treat silence as data—but not as self-interpreting data. If you don’t get an answer to a question, that’s an answer. Float a charitable interpretation of the silence and invite people to correct your interpretation.
For example, if you’re facilitating a Feature Mining session and you get crickets when you ask “What makes this a big effort?” you can say, “It sounds like this actually isn’t big enough to need to split into features. Let’s wrap this meeting early and go build it today.”
There’s a chance it actually is already too small to split. More likely, people will jump in to correct your interpretation and start answering the original question now that you’ve reframed it.
3. Offer different ways of engaging
Organize your meetings to engage people in a variety of ways. Facilitators are often people who like to think out loud, so many meetings are optimized for on-the-spot discussion.
But not everyone works that way.
Make space sometimes for individual thinking before discussion. “Let’s take 2 minutes to brainstorm individually on sticky notes, and then we’ll share the ideas that came up.”
Incorporate visual, spatial, and graphical activities for people who think more in shapes than in words. For example, in phase 1 of our CAPED approach, after brainstorming assumptions, we don’t just have participants discuss which ones should be tested. We invite them to visually arrange the assumptions over a Cynefin diagram to identify the core complexity of an initiative.
4. Ask better questions
Take the time to think through the questions you use in meetings. Slight changes in how you ask a question can dramatically change how people respond.
Here’s an example we use in our training all the time…
If you give instructions for an activity and then ask, “What questions do you have?” you’re likely to get some questions. If you ask instead, “Any questions?” you’ll only get the most pressing questions. The former assumes there are questions and invites them in an open-ended way. The latter is really a “yes-no” question and signals there probably shouldn’t be questions but that you’ll accept questions if there are. Both forms are useful at different times.
Similarly, if you ask in a retrospective, “What do you feel is impeding the flow of value for our team?” that suggests we’re just sharing our individual feelings about it. It’s hard to know whether we’re supposed to debate the answers. If you ask instead, “What’s most impeding the flow of value for our team?” it becomes clearer that you’ve invited a discussion about a shared objective reality.
5. Close the loop
Build a track record as someone whose meetings lead to real outcomes. Facilitate towards an outcome and then close the loop so people see that their participation was worth it.
Your planning meetings should lead to visible plans. Your retrospectives should lead to actual changes. Your review meetings should finish with a summary of how the feedback is going to be used.
Level up your facilitation skills
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Facilitation is just one of the many essential skills you’ll develop in our Certified ScrumMaster workshop. We go beyond the basics to help you advance in facilitation, coaching, and conflict resolution—the kind of skills that create high-performing teams.
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