Managers notice from time to time that some of their subordinates are less active than others during virtual gatherings. However, due to the fact that it has already been a year since the world is living in intermittent lockdowns and created by the Work-From-Home environment, the lack of employees’ enthusiasm cannot be attributed to a mere failure to adapt to the new workplace reality.
At the same time, such engagement deficiency is quite a serious problem for businesses, both in its scope and financial implications. For example, according to a Gallup study, in the United States alone, the percentage of workers who have a status other than “engaged” (and whatever this status is, it is obviously not the optimal one) is as high as 66%. As a result, according to another Gallup study, the losses for US companies range between 450$ and 550$ billion annually.
Hence, deciphering the reasons for employee disengagement is a vital task for any high-level company representative. What is more, it is important to specifically uncover the reasons for lacking proactivity during online meetings, because this is likely to be the way of conducting business affairs for years to come, especially due to the fact that the long-awaited vaccine did not turn out to be a panacea. Without further ado, here are 5 major reasons for employees’ seemingly low involvement during a Zoom call.
1.Inconvenient work schedule. This issue has become acute in the last year specifically due to the rise of remote work, thus people from the same team might now be scattered all over the globe. In these working conditions, quite common is the situation when the meeting is set at a time not only inappropriate for some team member, but outright destroying their day and night schedule. As such, this team member has a chance to come to the online meeting tired and sleepy, the state not really favorable for active participation in any discussion.
The solution here is to try and set up virtual gatherings at a time appropriate for everyone but this is easier said than done. Indeed, the problem of inconsistent working schedules concerns not only international teams, but even teams whose members are from the same country. Namely, in the USA alone, there are 6 time zones, while in Russia there are 11 of them! However, TeamCalendar.ai has managed to elaborate a solution with their convenient online calendar making it possible to set a meeting with an entire team in one click, while simultaneously taking into account different time zones.
2.Team members have nothing to do. The question here is not simple boredom because the meeting might be even pretty exciting. However, the disengaged employee might be feeling useless due to insufficiency of active participation that is not the product of the employee’s actions themselves. In other words, the worker does not become involved in the meeting not because of personal reasons (these are, more or less, the other 4 cases in this article), but simply because they have nothing to do.
For example, the meeting might be aimed at discussing sales, but the whole team is invited just for the sake of it (read here how to do team building properly). Or, one person (usually an authoritarian and narcissistic boss) hoards all the meeting time, not letting anyone else to speak. As a result, non-salespeople or subordinates to the self-admiring boss have nothing to say during the meeting and overall have an impression that they might have been doing something more productive with their time.
3.The meetings are too long or are held too often. The logic here is quite straightforward and two-pronged. First, when the online gathering goes beyond the appropriate time (40 minutes maximum, even better — 18 minutes), there is nothing substantial left to be discussed, thus, metaphorically, everyone is just “flogging a dead…meeting”.
Second, when the meetings are organized very frequently, the agenda is also not busy enough to justify the whole team assembly. Besides, such “dottedly” scheduled meetings disrupt the normal workflow, thus lower team productivity. Incidentally, this never-ending stream of long online call-ins with little to gain from them gave birth to a meme which everyone could become familiar with just by googling “this meeting should have been an email”.
4.Interpersonal tensions. In particular, someone from the team might be afraid to speak up because they fear harsh criticism from one of their colleagues. Additionally, someone might even purposefully restrain themselves because they know they could snap at an even anodyne comment issued by the person they dislike. For instance, such a situation could happen when two employees, having completely opposite opinions regarding some work-related problem, go beyond working relations and transform a productive disagreement into a personal feud.
On the one hand, in an ideal world, workers are all supposed to be grown-ups and behave professionally, which is even set in stone in their contracts. On the other, unfortunately, or fortunately…anyway, humans are driven by emotions to the same (if not higher) degree as they are guided by rational decisions. In this regard, even if they are not directly responsible for the interpersonal communications between team members, managers and team leaders should intervene and report the matter to HR if they see that some of the colleagues do not get along. In fact, “working things out between the two of us” does not always work, and when it indeed does not, team efficiency suffers.
5.Employees do not care. The saddest of the reasons for the lack of participation during online meetings. The specific factors of this indifference might range from the employee realizing that this sphere is not what they want to do in life (e.g. a showman suddenly realizes that he wants to become a politician) to a more painful realization that the worker do not believe in you as a good leader, thus doubts the success of all your undertakings.
Subsequently, the company would most probably have to part ways with such an employee, either on the worker initiative or due to the worker’s low KPIs. Nonetheless, it is always better to check whether the other 4 factors from this article come into play, hence do not haste to get rid of an otherwise productive but having a temporary difficulty specialist.
As was already said in the very beginning of the article, creating a meeting at a time appropriate for everyone is as important as it is demanding. To solve this particular problem, TeamCalendar.ai has elaborated an intuitively understandable online calendar for meetings, which simultaneously takes into consideration different time zones team members might be living in. To experience this and other useful features of TeamCalendar.ai, request a demo.
