5 Simple Activities to Make Team Meetings More Fun and Engaging

Meetings are boring. Raise your hand if you agree with that statement. Okay, that should be every single one of you, except for the two of you out there. Like, I love meetings. For most of us, though, meetings are boring. In this video, I want to show you five ways that you can spice up your next meeting to make it more engaging. Let's get into it. We've all been there. We all know that meetings sometimes can drag on and the energy drops lower and lower and lower. But there are some ideas I have to help you to bring that energy back up. Keep the motivation going. Keep the energy going for your team. So here are five ways, five activities you can do throughout your meeting to kind of spice it up and get that energy going. Here is idea number one. Take any object. For example, you could take this wire tree, set it in the middle of the table, and then challenge everyone to say, when you look at this object, how does it remind you of how your day is going so far? And then you pass it from person to person to person. But you could take any object. You could take this eraser, tiny little eraser right here and say, how does this eraser represent what your day's been so far? Take any object, place it in the middle, and then go around and ask a question related to that object. That activity is called My Day is Life. Here is idea number two. It is called the Story of a Scar. And you ask everyone to challenge the group and say, tell us about one scar on your body, and if you can, point to it. So, for example, for me, I would point to a scar that I have right here on my hand, and I might say, oh, this scar was when I had a little cyst in my hand and the doctor said I didn't need to do anything with it. But oddly, every time I would clap, it would actually hit against the nerve. And so I did get it removed. And now I have this lovely little scar right here on my hand. And then each person goes around and shares a story of their scar. Here is idea number three. It is called human chain. One person, probably you, as the facilitator of that meeting, stands up and starts listing facts about themselves. And at point, some, at some point, they're going to list a fact that connects with someone else in the group, meaning that person also shares that interest or that fact together. You too? Oh, yeah. Once that connection is made, you sit down, that person stands up, and they start listing facts. The goal is to list off facts until every single person in the room has stood up and made a connection around some random unique fact with someone else in the room. The fourth is called roses and thorns. I'm sure some of you who have families have probably played this around the dinner table before, but roses and thorns is each person goes around and if they think back over the past 30 days or a week, what's been one rose in their world and what's been one thorn in their world. For example, a rose for me might be that we were working on a massive house project and finally the renovations are done and I just get to enjoy our house. A thorn might be that my back and my legs are hurting because I haven't been able to do yoga because I've been traveling so much. That would be my rose and my thorn. And the fifth and final activity that you can do with your group is called shout outs. And shout outs is an opportunity where everyone in the room gets the chance to shout someone else out for something that they did over the past period of time. It could be one week, one day, or a month if you haven't seen each other in a month. And that shout out should be something that they shared with you. It could be a conversation you had with them. It could be something they physically did. It could be something that they did in their world and they got celebrated for. And you want to give them celebration for go around and give some shout out. It should be done popcorn style. Meaning don't force everyone to share something. So there you go. You got five ways to increase the engagement. The energy in your meeting you have in reverse order. Shout out, roses and thorns, the human chain, stars. And lastly, my day is hopefully you try one of these out. Actually, I'm going to encourage you to try one of these out. See how it works in your next meeting and when you do, drop it in the comment and share with us how it worked for you. If you like this video, hit that subscribe button so that you get notified for all of our future videos. My name is Tom and I'm here to help you to engage your people.