There are a lot of engagement features built into every video platform. The best ones and how to use them are discussed here. As of June 2020, the top popular videoconferencing apps are Zoom, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, and GoToMeeting.¹ The one constant in technology is change, so this list can change rapidly. The good news is that you can find similar features on whatever your favorite platform is.

“You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.”

—Steve Jobs

Only use the right tools for the right job. Often, the right tool is the one your participants already know rather than a new one. Please understand, you don't have to use any or all of these tools. As the host, it's useful to know about these tools so you can help solve challenges and keep the meeting engaging by using the correct tool during your meeting.

“The (person) who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”

—Confucius

As you think about tools, use the metaphor of small stones as your virtual meeting tools. Introduce your virtual meeting tools one at a time instead of introducing a mountain of them at the same time. Applying adult learning theory, if your participants experience success with a new tool, they are more likely to use it and are more likely to want to learn the next tool. Think about staging your tools. Do not introduce all of your virtual engagement tools at once. For new participants, this is overwhelming and threatening and they will consider not coming back. Instead show one or two tools after you feel your participants have mastered the existing tools they know. Invest time and introduce each tool in a unique, possibly fun and nonwork way before using it for real work. Engage your audience and find out if they like the tool. Just because you like it doesn't mean they will. Find someone who is good at using the tool. For instance, one of your participants might be an artist, so doing freehand annotations could be their skill. In your staging, have a strategy reminding yourself that your goal is to be engaging and to get work done.

You can join the Engaging Virtual Meetings Facebook group at bit.ly/evmfb for free to keep up with the latest platforms and virtual tools.

Chat

Chat is the second most engaging virtual tool and I addressed it in Chapter 1 as part of Get Productive with Virtual Tools. Let's go into further detail with Chat and how you can use it in your meetings.

The most common problem with virtual meetings is that only one person can talk at a time. As soon as your meetings get to five people or more, you most likely can't say something when you want to say it, like you would in a face-to-face meeting. Chat solves that.

Just click “chat” and type in a message and everyone attending can see. I suggest you introduce chat after you engage and interact with every participant using audio and video. The best way to introduce chat is to have everyone chat something like their name or location. As the host, make sure everybody has chatted something. If they haven't chatted, make sure you ask them to chat and, if necessary, help them find the chat feature on their computer, tablet, or phone.

To chat:

On a PC or Mac computer:

• Step 1: Click “Chat.”

On an iPad or iPhone or Droid phone or tablet:

• Step 1: Tap “More…”
• Step 2: Tap “Chat.”

If a participant is on a phone or tablet, the chat window covers some or all of their screen, so they will have a harder time watching chat all the time. They do get a notification with every new chat, but they will be slower to reply by chat.

Private Chat

Remember when you could have sidebar conversations in a meeting? You could whisper to the person next to you about the meeting and not disturb the actual meeting. If you do that in a virtual meeting, every participant hears you at the same volume as the speaker; it is very distracting and could be embarrassing, depending on what you are saying.

Private chat is the sidebar conversation. Private chat is the ability to send a message to one participant that no one else can see.

To “private chat”:

• Step 1: Open your chat window.
• Step 2: Select To: and choose a participant.
• Step 3: Type a message and hit enter.

Be very careful to double-check who you are sending to if you are sending sensitive information. If you private chat someone or someone private chats you, most virtual meetings will default to private chat back to that person. That's great, except when you want to chat to everyone. A common mistake is to send a private chat to a participant when you meant to send it to everybody.

Microsoft Teams

To chat:

• Step 1: Click “Show conversation.”

• Step 2: Write a message and press Enter.

Microsoft Teams has a robust chat feature that includes font editing such as size and color; a standard, important (marked as important), and urgent feature (chatting someone will notify them every 2 minutes for 20 minutes); chatting files; emojis (emotion icons such as happy and sad), GIFs (moving pictures); stickers; and any Microsoft app such as Microsoft Forms to send a survey in the chat.

If you have a large screen or multiple screens, you can follow chat in a separate Teams window or in an internet browser using http://teams.microsoft.com to find your chat. This will give you the advantage of being able to see your meeting, your participants (for hand raising or muting), and your chat window at the same time. This can give you the ability to respond quickly if you are paying attention to all of the windows. I suggest you have a scanning routine. Much like lifeguards are taught to scan from left to right, you can scan the main video, the participant window, and the chat window consistently through your meeting.

In Microsoft Teams, your chat will have threaded conversations. What this means is that you have the choice to reply to a topic or start a new topic. This makes it easier for all participants to follow a conversation, as your chat will be shown with the original topic and easier to understand as you can read the replies in order.

Breakouts

Breakouts are the third most valuable virtual meeting engagement tool behind audio/video and chat. The key reason breakout rooms are engaging is that they change speaking and engagement dynamics. By putting participants into smaller groups, more people can talk, and some people who are not comfortable asking questions in a large group are more likely to participate in a small group. One benefit of more people being able to talk means that your meeting can be more engaging.

You must turn this feature on before you can use it. Here's how to turn on Breakout Rooms in Zoom:

• Step 1: Log in to your account on zoom.us.

• Step 2: Go to the “Admin” section and click “Account Management.”
• Step 3: Click “Account Settings.”

• Step 4: Click “In Meeting (advanced),” turn on “Breakout Rooms.”
• Step 5: Check the “Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling” box.

If this feature is not available to you, it can be turned off at the company level. Ask your company's IT department if it's turned off and whether they will consider turning it on.

The next time you start a meeting, you'll see the Breakout Rooms button.

When you have three or more people in your meeting, you can create a breakout room.² Automatic assignments will randomly and evenly assign participants to breakout rooms. This feature is great if you did not plan ahead or if you are looking for random networking.

To create a breakout room using Automatic assignment:

• Step 1: Click the “Breakout Rooms” button.

• Step 2: Click the number of rooms you want.
• Step 3: Click “Automatically.”
• Step 4: Click “Create Breakout Rooms.”

• Step 5: Click “Open All Rooms.”

• Step 6: Participants will receive a message to join their breakout rooms.

• Step 7 (optional): As the host, you have the capability of joining any room. It is a good practice to check that each room has participants in it and that they understand what they should be doing. To join a breakout room, click “Join” next to the Breakout Session.

• Step 8 (optional): Click “Broadcast a message to all” and enter a message to send to all. Tip: Have your messages ready, copy and paste a message, and then click “Broadcast” at the specified time. See the example below for a suggested format for broadcast messages.

• Step 9: Click “Close All Rooms” and participants will return to the main meeting.

To create a breakout room using manual assignment:

• Step 1: Click the “Breakout Rooms” button.

• Step 2: Click “Manually.”
• Step 3: Click the number of rooms you want.
• Step 4: Click “Create Breakout Rooms.”

• Step 5: Click “Assign” next to each breakout room and check who you'd like to assign to that room.

• Step 6: Click “Open All Rooms.”

• Step 7: Participants will receive a message to join their breakout rooms.

• Step 8 (optional): As the host, you have the capability of joining any room. Again, it is a good practice to check that each room has participants in it and that they understand what they should be doing. To join a breakout room, click “Join” next to the Breakout Session.

• Step 9 (optional): Click “Broadcast a message to all” and enter a message to send to all. Tip: Have your messages ready, copy and paste a message, and then click “Broadcast” at the specified time. See the example below for a suggested format for broadcast messages.

• Step 10: Click “Close All Rooms” and participants will return to the main meeting.

You can randomly assign people to rooms or you can assign people to specific rooms.

Here are some of the best and more creative uses for breakout rooms.

In a learning meeting, one of our best practices is to have a breakout room facilitator who can help monitor the air traffic control and guide the conversation to ensure that it's engaging and can be reported back effectively to your meeting.

You can meet with your facilitators prior to the meeting and make sure they know the agenda and what you'd like to happen in each breakout room. Since some people may not have been in breakout rooms before, it's easy to get distracted and not hear the instructions from the host. Assign one facilitator to every room. Next, assign other participants to the rooms.

Another best practice is to pre-write breakout messages. We find 6 minutes for a 60-minute meeting is a good breakout time to start with; it's not too long and not too short. You should put two to six people in a standard breakout where they are addressing a question or a topic. The goal of the breakout is for one member to report back to the main meeting for 30 or 60 seconds. The guidelines for the breakout meeting are that every participant gets an opportunity to contribute and you have a speaker ready by the end. For a 6-minute breakout, here are example messages to discuss engaging virtual meetings:

• Welcome to your breakout room; you have 6 minutes to discuss what makes a virtual meeting engaging.
• There are 4 minutes remaining—remember to give each person at least one chance to talk.
• There are 2 minutes remaining—remember to select one person to report back in 60 seconds.
• There is 1 minute remaining—close up your conversation by the end of the 60-second timer.
• Now click the “Close Breakout Rooms” button.

New uses for breakout rooms are developing every day. Here is a clever way to give participants thinking time. Create breakout rooms of one person each and send people off to the breakout room to contemplate a question or their learning. This benefits those who like to analyze or need quiet time to process information, such as introverts. Jimbo Clark at Innogreat (innogreat.com) was the first person I saw to use this.

Here is Zoom's current guide to managing breakout rooms.³ Please know that this technology is rapidly changing, so make sure to test out breakout rooms before you attempt to use them in a meeting.

Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms

To create breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams:

• Step 1: Create one or more meetings in your Microsoft Teams calendar.
• Step 2: Copy the links for each of the meetings.

• Step 3: During your Teams meeting, chat the links to the breakout rooms.

• Step 4: Give clear instructions of who should click which link. For example, first names starting with A through I click Link #1, first names starting with J through O click Link #2, and first names starting with P through Z click Link #3.
• Step 5: Tell every participant to click the telephone “Hang Up” button when they are done with their breakout to return to the main room.

While there are fewer steps than Zoom, Teams currently has less control. This means that an attendee can go to the wrong room and it's easier to get “lost in space,” meaning stuck in a room and not able to return to the general session. One best practice is to have a breakout room facilitator and make sure they are the first person to get to a room to greet people as they enter the breakout room. The breakout room facilitator should also be the last person in the room to help anyone hang up from the room and return to the correct location. The features in Microsoft Teams are changing. You can read the Microsoft Teams blog for their latest updates.⁴

Reactions

Applause

Let's say you're having a medium to large meeting (15 or more participants) where most participants will spend their time on mute because you have a special speaker. You can ask for applause for the speaker using Reactions. This has the benefit of you and the speaker seeing the applause at the same time on the screen.

Click “Reactions->Applause” to show applause. This will show an applause icon in your video window for approximately 10 seconds. This can be useful when your audio is muted and/or your video is turned off.

Thumbs Up

You're holding a meeting and again most participants are on mute. If you want to confirm that they can hear you or that they can hear the audio from your shared video, ask them to use Reactions to give you a thumbs up. You can pause or talk to someone who doesn't have their thumbs up until you fix all the technical problems.

Click “Reactions->Thumbs Up” to show approval in your video window for 10 seconds. This can be useful when your audio is muted and/or your video is turned off.

On the diversity and inclusion front, you can customize the color of your reaction skin tone to match yours or to represent you differently.

Record

Did you ever want your meeting recorded? Was it too much to set up multiple cameras and microphones? Did you want to share your meeting with someone who couldn't attend?

Zoom, Teams, and most virtual meeting platforms have a record feature. It's as simple as clicking one button. You can record to your computer or you can record to the cloud, an online storage location that can be shared easily.

If you record to the cloud, you will get a link to a video after the meeting. You can send that link to any participant to share.

On Zoom, you can set the recording to record different views such as active speaker, gallery, and presentation mode (speaker plus shared screen). If you are editing your video, this gives you more high-quality choices to edit your video. If you have a Zoom corporate account, it can also give you the transcription automatically with every saved video.

On Teams, your recording is saved to Microsoft Streams if you have a corporate account. Microsoft Streams is like an internal version of YouTube that will hold all of your videos, allow you to protect it from out-of-company viewers, and allow you to share it only with specific people; it also offers automatic transcription.

If you recorded to your computer, you need to find a way to share the file with others.

Recording allows you to use the video you create to share with others. This is a way to engage others by sharing on social media. You can also take the time to edit your video to increase the production value of your content.

One of the best examples is The Actors Fund, which produced a video of the song “You Can't Stop the Beat” to raise money for this charity. You'll see masterful editing of over 100 people's virtual meetings into a song at bit.ly/evmactors.

Share Video

Sharing a video can be a powerful way to engage your audience. Cisco's research says that 80% of the content consumed online will be video by 2021.⁵ Videos have the ability to explain a lot in a short amount of time, to educate while being entertaining, and to visually engage your participants.

To share a video:

• Step 1: Click “Share Screen.”

• Step 2: Check “Optimize Screen Sharing for Video Clip.” This will also check “Share computer sound.” A common mistake is to forget to check “Share computer sound,” so double-check it.
• Step 3: Click “Share.”

• Step 4: Click “Play” on your video. If this is the first time you're playing a video, play 10–15 seconds, pause the video, and ask if your participants can hear the video. If they can, click “Play” again.
• Step 5 (optional): Your audio can echo when you are sharing a video, so click “Mute” to turn off your microphone.

• Step 6 (optional): If you want to see the reactions of your participants, click “More” and then click “Show Video Panel.” Note that your participants' video panel will block the other participants' view of the playing video, so drag it to another screen or make sure the video panel window is in a place that is not blocking an important part of the playing video.

• Step 7 (optional): Click “Unmute” when your video is done.
• Step 8: Click “Stop Share.”

You may choose to play a short video to create energy and make a point to your participants. You may choose to play a longer video such as an educational keynote and use virtual tools such as chat to have a discussion while you and your participants watch the video. Videos can be a powerful engagement tool when you pick and present the right video for your participants.

Share Whiteboard

The whiteboard is a good place for your participants to collaborate. Like chat, the whiteboard is a place where your participants can collaborate at the same time. It is visual so it can help you represent complex ideas quickly. For most participants, this is a new feature, so make sure to take time for your participants to learn about this tool before attempting to do work with it.

To share a whiteboard:

• Step 1: Click “Share Screen.”

• Step 2: Click “Whiteboard”
• Step 3: Click “Share.”

The default tool is the pen. You and every participant can draw on the whiteboard.

See Chapter 16 for how to use additional advanced virtual engagement tools, including all the annotation tools.

One of the easiest ways to learn how to use this tool is to play Pictionary. The organizer private chats a word to the drawer. The drawer proceeds to draw something to get the other participants to guess the drawn word in 60 seconds or less without talking or using any gestures. You can ensure that by turning off the drawer's audio and video. Take turns with each participant being the drawer. Now, in the future, you can use the whiteboard as a virtual meeting tool to help visualize ideas, brainstorm, and plan. You can click “Save” to save a copy of the image you create.

You can see an example on bit.ly/evmpictionary.

Do you ever brainstorm with Post-It notes? You can teach how to use the whiteboard by completing a brainstorming exercise. Click the “Text” tool, click on the whiteboard, and start typing. Have the participants add one or more text boxes with ideas on it. When the host says stop, you can move the text boxes to group them together into like ideas.

If you want to save your whiteboard, click “Save.”

Click “Show in folder” if you want to know where your whiteboard is saved.

Ask the drawer to click “Stop Share.”

As the host, you can click “Share Screen” to take control back and quickly click “Stop Share” to return to the gallery view.

Share iPhone/iPad

You can share your iPhone or iPad screen. If you are showing an app, you can show exactly how it looks and works to your participants, which can help if your app only works on the iPhone or iPad. This can help in making a decision to buy an app or how to use an app for an upcoming meeting. This is also a fast way to show photos or videos that are only on your phone.

This is a multi-step process. Make sure to test and practice this before you attempt to use it during your virtual meeting.

• Step 1: Click “Share Screen.”

• Step 2: Click “iPhone/iPad.”

• Step 3: Click “Share.”

• Step 4 (optional): If this is the first time sharing your iPhone, you will click “Install” on the plugin.

• Step 5: Make sure your iPhone is on and that you are connected to the same network as the computer.

• Step 6: On your iPhone or iPad, swipe up and tap the “Screen Mirroring” button.

• Step 7: Tap on the name of your device, usually Zoom-(device name).

• Step 8: Go to your device and go to the app that you want to share. Ask your participants if they can see your screen.

• Step 9: Click “Stop Share.”

You can use this feature for creative uses. If you want the equivalent of an overhead projector or a second camera, you can share your device's camera. You can have it mounted on a tripod or other device to stabilize the camera. Look for new uses for this feature and use it if it works for your virtual meeting.

For a video to demonstrate this, see bit.ly/evmshareiphone.

Polling

Polling is a very engaging tool with which you can engage a large number of participants in a very short amount of time. Polling can also work for smaller groups. Once the numbers exceed 25 people, polling becomes a preferred tool as it can engage everyone quickly.

To use Polling, you need to turn this feature on:

• Step 1: Log in to your account on zoom.us.

• Step 2: Go to “Admin->Account Settings->Polling.”

• Step 3: Turn on Polling.

To set up a poll for a meeting:

• Step 1: Log in to your account on zoom.us.
• Step 2a: If you want to reuse polls, set up polls for your Personal Meeting Room and use your Personal Meeting Room for any meeting you want to poll. Go to “Personal->Meetings->Personal Meeting Room.”
• Step 2b: If you want to set up a poll for just one meeting, go to “Personal->Meetings->Upcoming Meetings” and select the meeting you want to poll.

• Step 3: Click “Add.”

• Step 4: Enter a title for this poll.
• Step 5: Check the box if you want your poll to be anonymous. If you leave the box unchecked, it will generate a report you can download that has the username, email address, date, and time they submitted their answer, the poll question, and what the user answered.
• Step 6: Enter your question for this poll.
• Step 7: Choose single choice or multiple choice.
• Step 8: Enter an answer. Repeat one to nine more times.
• Step 9: Click “Save.”

To run your poll during your meeting:

• Step 1: Click “Polls.” A common mistake is to make the poll in the wrong meeting, So if your poll is not there, go back to the previous step and confirm which meeting you put your poll in. A good practice is to rehearse your poll by starting the link for your meeting and testing your poll with another participant.

• Step 2: Select your poll. If you have more than one poll, click the and select the poll you want to start.
• Step 3: Click “Launch Polling.”

• Step 4: Ask your participants if they can see the poll. This is what the poll looks like to a participant. A best practice is to read the poll aloud, including the choices. This is helpful for those who may not be able to read the screen. It also takes time for people to see the poll, make a decision, make their selections, and click “Submit.” You can see how many of the participants have responded to the poll, which will help you decide when to end the poll.

• Step 5: End the poll by clicking “End Polling.”

• Step 6 (optional): Click “Share Results.” One of the engaging features of polling is that you can instantly share the results with your participants. It's natural for participants to want to see the results of the poll and how it relates to how they personally voted. You can engage your participants by asking what they see in these poll results. This can also help you make decisions, as you can see what your participants want to do.

• Step 7: Click “Stop Share Results” to complete your poll. If you want to run two or more polls back to back, click “Re-launch Polling” and choose another poll. Go back to Step 3.

Company-Wide Chat (only available in Microsoft Teams)

While Zoom currently has the most videoconference features, Microsoft Teams excels in integration with Office 365 and other third-party applications. Microsoft Teams brings together a collection of collaboration tools that allow large groups to work together and share more information in an organized way.

Have you ever wanted to chat with any teammate, whether they were around the world or in a different area of the same building? Many virtual platforms' chat is limited only to the people logged in. Microsoft Team's chat works with anyone on your company's system. It's private to the company, so you don't have to worry about the security and challenges of open social media systems like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The real value is in getting answers almost instantly. Microsoft Teams' chat is faster than email and if the other person is online, they can respond instantly.

Another key feature is that if you find that chatting is not enough to solve your problem, then you can instantly invite the other person into your meeting. Just like being able to ask someone to join your conference room, this is even faster and more convenient as you can ask anyone to join your meeting instantly, no matter where they are in the world, assuming they are up and online.

Channels (only available in Microsoft Teams)

Instead of emails that span many projects, have you ever wished that all the people, conversations, files, and important information about that project was just in one place? Now you can have it with Microsoft Teams Channels.

Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—whatever works for your team. Files that you share in a channel (on the “Files” tab) are stored in Microsoft's online storage.⁶ People can be assigned to a channel as the people involved in a project.

You can call a meeting with all the people for your project. If you have already defined the people for a channel, you can ask for a meeting by clicking one button, “Meet.” This is a way you can increase collaboration on your team if your team is currently available. You can schedule the meeting in the calendar and every participant listed in the channel will get the invite.

Click “Teams” and you'll see a list of channels. For a project, there is a general channel and then you can add more as subprojects.

Every channel has a collection of people who are involved with the project and will get notified if anything changes. You can have different levels of security so everyone on a project can see the general channel, but only some people will see a confidential channel.

General has key features such as posts, files, wiki (a website that allows for collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users), and any of the Office 365 apps like OneNote, Word, and Excel. What this means is that you can create a big collection of a wide variety of resources for your project that includes Microsoft as well as over 500 programs from other developers.

For instance, when we were planning for a 200-person conference, we had 36 people from around the world who were helping to deliver the conference. We had a Teams channel for all 36 people. It featured the RunTheShow Excel document that locations around the world needed to use. It also had every survey used, every infographic used in the presentations, every slide deck for the presentations, and every video that was recorded and used for playback later. Any change was instantly seen by anyone around the world who was in that channel. Ultimately, it led to an engaging meeting for the 200 attendees because the 36 people worked so well together using Microsoft Teams Channels.

Teams Apps (only available in Microsoft Teams)

A key feature of Teams is the ability to create an app that works with Microsoft Teams. Let's say your project uses Quizlet, a program that allows you to create quizzes to learn new material and share them with other participants. Instead of sharing a link that takes you outside to another program, you can add your Quizlet using a Teams app and it will be available in Microsoft Teams. There are over 500 apps as of this writing for analytics, artificial intelligence, collaboration, and more. If you are a Microsoft Teams user, take the time to learn this feature and look for solutions that already exist instead of creating something yourself.

During your virtual meeting, you can chat the link to your Quizlet app and have every participant take your quiz to find out if they retained the information from the last meeting. Because there are many apps, with more apps being added every day, new virtual tools are becoming available to your virtual meetings to help you get your job done.

There is even a Zoom Teams app, which means you can use both the collaboration features of Teams and the videoconferencing of Zoom in the same application. Some companies have chosen to do this to get the best features of Zoom and Microsoft Teams.