Engagement indicator is a tool that enables session awareness of participant attention during video meetings. This feature allows the meeting owner to instantly see who of the participants is distracted and steer the conference in a more interactive direction.
The whole point of any online meeting is the possibility to exchange information face-to-face, which is extremely important in both personal and business communication. In any meeting, the participants need to focus entirely on the discussion, so as to retain as many facts as possible.
In business, conferences like board meetings are an essential part of decision-making. In distance learning, the more students memorize during video lectures, the better qualified they become and the higher grade they get. For this reason, it is quite useful to track levels of participants’ attentiveness during video conferencing.
Thanks to engagement indicators the conference owner can monitor participants’ engagement and manage the progress of the event. The indicators are usually displayed in the client application for video conferencing and are visible to the conference owner or host.
Having detected the unattentive attendees, the speaker can choose one of the following options:
- Analyse the flow of the conversation. Ask yourself if the meeting is going as planned. If the speaker often goes off-topic or is not prepared for the meeting, it is time for the conference owner to intervene and put the meeting back on track.
- Add visual aids. Some topics that need discussing can be rather extensive. The listeners can get tired or confused if there is no visual presentation of data to support a long speech. In some cases, several images (e.g. charts, graphs, tables, diagrams, etc.) are enough to engage the listeners.
- Bring in an ice-breaker. Sometimes lengthy discussions of important issues add tension to the mood of the conference. The participants may feel uncomfortable or sad, and an ice-breaker can make the conversation more friendly.
- Reconsider the meeting structure. If the meeting doesn’t follow any logical well-balanced plan with abrupt changes in subjects of discussion, participants may want to distract themselves to catch a little break. If you follow a well-structured plan in your conference, it will become more productive and interesting for the participants.