Building participation and involvement in complex companies

Building participation and involvement is a challenge, even in simple, single site local businesses.

Do you attend meetings, conferences and events where the best parts are the breaks and evenings and the meetings themselves are boring and uninvolving?

The challenge is magnified in complex companies

• The opportunity to get face to face becomes scarce and expensive. We need to rigorously prioritise our face to face time and how we spend it. We have to engage diverse audiences with limited time and create buy-in and commitment quickly.

• The majority of involvement happens remotely – we need to engage people through audio conference, webinar and other communications technology.

If you are involved in chairing face to face or remote meetings, meetings planning or meeting facilitation, or (particularly) if you are a participant, you know how frustrating it can be to attend unnecessary and passive meetings, conference calls and events

Participants in our speed survey tell us they spend 40% of their time in meetings and conference calls, and 50% of the time these are irrelevant –that’s a day per week in unnecessary meetings and conference calls. Costs are high, satisfaction is low – we all want fewer, better meetings.

We think there is too much focus on the presenter or leader, and too little on the role of the audience – and they are the majority. Our approach is to design better meetings, conferences and large events by focusing first on the participant experience.

We have developed extremely engaging ways to get information across and encourage active participation in our audiences. We are also skilled at getting participation from culturally diverse groups and in webinars and other remote contexts.

Call us first when you are planning your meeting or event and we can help with design and/or facilitation to increase participation and involvement.

Listen to our podcast on creating more participation and involvement Dismal meetings and surprisingly useful coffee breaks

Download a pdf article on building more participative meetings