Improving Audience Engagement With Virtual Meetings and Events
Since the mass adoption of working from home during the pandemic, we have seen massive growth in platforms such as Teams and Zoom for not only meetings that would have previously been carried out face-to-face, but also for training sessions, events, and internal communications.
By the end of 2023, Teams had around 320 million users worldwide, and Zoom, although not releasing comparable user figures, was being used by 220,400 enterprise customers, which Zoom defines as “distinct business units who have been engaged by either our direct sales team, resellers, or strategic partners.” Between the two platforms, this represents a huge userbase.
However, in this space, it has not been a time of unrivalled growth and success for every supplier. In June 2024, Meta announced that it would be shuttering Workplace by Meta, its collaboration, chat, and video call tool, by the end of May 2026, with some functionality beginning to be decommissioned by August 2025. This is a substantial U-turn for a service that has 7 million paying subscribers, representing a 40% year-over-year rise from its October 2016 release through May 2024. The recommended replacement partner for those on Workplace is Workvivo, which is a company owned by Zoom.
With Zoom likely to grow still further through Workplace customer acquisitions, Teams continues to expand its userbase through its bundling with Office 365. Both solutions have become ingrained into employees’ everyday work and are not likely to disappear any time soon.
Chronic Fatigue
While being incredibly useful and widely used communication tools, these services are not without some serious problems when it comes to engaging and retaining an audience.
“Zoom fatigue” is a well-established term and obviously applies to all video meetings and events platforms, not just Zoom. Fatigue has been discussed since the start of the pandemic and refers to the fact that virtual meetings and events seem to increase viewers’ feelings of weariness more than face-to-face meetings.
Research has tended to focus on questionnaires to try to ascertain the nature of the fatigue and has identified such symptoms as increased stress levels and tiredness, a reduction in user productivity, and a feeling of general disconnection.
Several studies have identified the lack of nuanced nonverbal cues in virtual meetings and viewers’ tendency to exaggerate nonverbal cues, such as nodding at everyone’s input to show engagement or constantly trying to maintain eye contact with the camera, as causes for disengagement and general tiredness.
A November 2023 study from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria also examined the physical effects of video meetings on both the brain and heart. As part of the study, 35 university students attended 50-minute lectures both in person and online via a video meeting solution. In addition to asking volunteers to complete questionnaires about fatigue and mood, the study also looked at how the meetings impacted the participants’ brain and heart functions by collecting electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) data.
The readings suggested that those taking part in a virtual lecture rather than a real-world one showed significantly greater signs of fatigue, sadness, and drowsiness and had generally negative feelings. The participants were also much less attentive and engaged. This matched the feedback from the questionnaires, which showed similar feelings amongst the volunteers.
Obviously, this work is based on university lectures with a relatively small pool of volunteers rather than general meetings, but combined with similar studies on Zoom fatigue, it gives a good indication of what organisations are seeing in terms of stakeholder and employee feedback from internal discussions and surveys. It also demonstrates that this fatigue is both a physical and psychological phenomenon.
One organisation I spoke with recently was delivering more than one live event per day via Teams. The feedback it garnered from the audience mirrored these indicators of discontent and exhaustion, along with a perceived lack of quality of the content.
So how do we overcome fatigue on these platforms? There are a number of key steps organisations can take to raise the quality of content delivered through these platforms to help better engage and involve their audiences.
Control and Length
One constant from audience feedback and studies on Zoom fatigue is commentary that the length of events contributes to the feeling of both tiredness and disconnection.
One way to resolve this issue is not necessarily by reducing the length of the events, but by introducing regular breaks in the proceedings. Research points at sessions of an hour or more being simply too long. In fact, in 2023, one piece of research from communications platform Airmeet indicated that 70% of people felt an event should be an hour or less. Two-thirds wouldn’t register for an event which was longer than 60 minutes in length. The longer the event, the more likely it is to lead to increased Zoom fatigue and disengagement. A variety of studies suggest that sessions which are 30–45 minutes in length and are followed by a break give the best result, particularly if part of a longer event.
Control is also key. A good amount of user feedback from within large corporations suggests that the care taken when delivering a real-world event is not replicated with virtual events. One particular element often referenced is that presenters are both speaking and running the technical elements of the virtual event, including moderating Q&A, pushing slides, and managing polls and videos.
In a real-world event, we wouldn’t expect a speaker to come on stage, plug in their laptop, struggle alone to get their slides on the main screen, and then facilitate the Q&A session by running around the auditorium with a mic to take audience questions. So why are presenters often asked to juggle all of these responsibilities (except for running around the room) during virtual events?
Speakers should do just that—speak—rather than attempt to also run the event, display slides, push polls, and moderate questions. By handing these duties off to a producer or moderator who runs each event session, organisations will see a sharp improvement in the quality of the content they present and how much the audience engages with the presentation without showing signs of fatigue.
Formats
A key element of live events which can lead to the general feeling of fatigue is that all Teams and Zoom meetings and webinars seem more or less the same. There is a significant increase in the levels of engagement if the formats of the sessions are varied throughout the day of an event or on a day-to-day basis if they form a regular series of events.
Think of the live presentation as a real-world event and consider all of the different forms it can take. You might have a keynote, followed by a panel discussion, then a more intimate breakout session with a smaller number of people. By changing formats daily or from session to session, you allow the audience to engage in different ways.
During a breakout session, audience cameras will focus on lots of interactive and hopefully engaging discussion, whereas during a keynote, viewers can participate with the cameras and audio off so they can take a rest and not be forced to exhibit the unnatural behaviours which we know lead to Zoom fatigue.
Using different styles and changing what is required of the viewer on a session-by-session basis ensures that the audience’s expectations and our requirements of them constantly change. This promotes more engagement and keeps the sessions feeling fresh rather than just being more of the same.
Elevating Video Production
Having a range of session formats can deliver much better engagement, but it is also worth looking at the video production of the event itself.
In terms of the production of live events on these platforms, we have all become accustomed to a standard Teams or Zoom format. So how can we make these more visually interesting as well as help the speakers simply speak?
The answer involves a combination of technology and management. By having speakers not log in directly to the delivery platform, you are able to have much more control over what is presented to the viewers.
Speakers can log in to a virtual vision mixer or virtual call software such as vMix. Initially, they would take part in an onboarding session with a moderator to ensure that their setup is optimised so they appear in the best way on the live programme. This can include simple steps such as having them plug their device into their router for better connectivity or moving away from light sources which wash out their video feed. Once the signal is optimised, the moderator can then take the speaker through how the sessions will run and how they appear on screen.
Managing virtual guests in vMix Call. Image by Anthony Burokas, IEBA Communications
Once onboarded, each remote guest or speaker appears as an individual input into the virtual vision mixer, allowing the moderator to mix between them in a much more sophisticated way. For example, for a panel discussion, you might start with the whole panel on screen, switch to the chair and to each speaker as they are introduced, and then only feature those speaking on the screen at any one time, mixing between single and multi-speaker shots. This means you can raise the production quality of the event, so it feels like a real-world multicamera shoot, which increases the dynamism of the live show by moving away from a static, single shot of the presenters and making the content easier to engage with.
This process also enables images such as background graphics, section stings, and lower thirds to be added into the session. Full-screen prerecorded video segments can also be played into the presentation, with everything being presented in a single video window. This means video content is much clearer to see, as it is not part of a slide or a separate window.
The output from the virtual vision mixer or virtual call software can then be output directly into the chosen distribution platform, be that Teams, Zoom, or some other option. Recent updates to vMix also allow Zoom sources to be added to vMix programmes.
Zoom-vMix integration for remote presenters. Image by Shawn Lam, SLV Live
Interactivity
Once the production of the session is elevated, the next step in driving engagement and reducing Zoom fatigue is to look at how much interactivity is built into the sessions.
As previously discussed, sessions which require a perceived level of engagement from having lots of viewers on camera can be exhausting. But that is not a reason to ignore interactivity in general. In some sessions, such as breakouts, this may include being on camera and contributing to the discussion. However, in panel or keynote sessions, the interactivity can drive engagement without requiring the viewer to be visible.
The most basic form of interaction is moderated Q&A, which can be done via text or video. Letting speakers join via a third-party virtual mixer or call systems also allows you to have viewers in a session raise their hand to ask a video question, have their question moderated, and then be put into the live video stream as neatly integrated additional speakers. This ensures that the overall production value of the event remains high.
However, text questions are also very useful, as they don’t require viewers to be on camera, which can be intimidating. As a result, events are likely to receive more questions in this format. These questions can be sorted by the event moderator before being displayed on a small window on the speakers’ or chair’s device.
Another way to drive interaction is to use polling, not only to get the opinion and views of the audience, but to also to drive the discussion into areas the audience is interested in. For example, a panel may be discussing a topic with five key areas. At the beginning of the session, the chair could explain those five areas and ask the audience to vote on which it is most interested in, with the audience able to select as many topics as it wishes. Using this poll result, the chair can shift the weight of the session so that more time is spent on topic areas that are important to the audience. If very few members of the audience vote for the key terms of reference as a topic, the chair might spend only a couple of minutes defining them. This allows the speakers to focus on another area in which the audience has shown a significant interest and use the additional time saved by shortening the terms of the reference section.
Polling, like text questions, is a low-friction way of getting input from the audience. It helps the members feel engaged and involved without using any techniques which are likely to create Zoom fatigue.
Interactivity is a big driver of engagement, and better audience engagement increases viewing times. Research carried out by Groovy Gecko at the end of 2023 demonstrated that relevant interactivity—even if it is only something simple such as moderated Q&A—doubles the audience’s average viewing times. In some cases, average viewing times have increased fivefold in A/B testing.
Evolution of Formats
As organisations develop more high-quality and engaging live events on Teams and Zoom, it is important for them to understand that they will not get everything right the first time.
It is vital to get both quantitative and qualitive feedback from event audiences as to what they did and didn’t feel worked well. Surveying with simple questions to score particular sessions on content and delivery is useful as a guide, but qualitative feedback on what they feel has been missed in terms of subjects covered is absolutely vital. Data directly from the live stream is also important to highlight sessions with poor attendance or low engagement.
These datapoints help to create a feedback loop which allows the creators of the content to take an iterative approach, not only in gradually improving the quality of the production and delivery of the content, but also through experimenting with alterations to sessions and content. This enables each event or session producer to try new things and “fail fast” by finding out what does and doesn’t work for the audience.
Controlling the length, variety, format, interactivity, and production value of online events delivered through platforms such as Zoom and Teams whilst enabling speakers to focus on delivering high-quality content increases viewer engagement with an event and, as a result, its effectiveness.
By using these foundational techniques, in conjunction with viewer feedback and data from the live event to continuously improve the format and quality of sessions, organisations can deliver more effective communication and maximise engagement. More importantly, it will enable them to overcome the fatigue associated with delivering events through these platforms.
Related Articles
With key streaming services such as Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix trying to drive down production costs across the board, premium content providers have spent considerable time looking at how they can develop or license content which isn't produced in English but can offer global appeal.
26 Aug 2024
Jake Ward, Business Development Director at Groovy Gecko, breaks down the current state of corporate video conferencing, with detailed analysis of Hopin, Brightcove, Kaltura, Vimeo Enterprise, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.
02 Apr 2024