Getting People to Participate in Virtual Meetings

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Getting People to Participate in Virtual MeetingsKeeping attendees engaged in a virtual meeting is a challenge. The potential for distractions is high. And once people tune out, it’s hard to get them back. Here are some techniques for keeping team members engaged from meeting start to finish.

  • Line up participation activities for all attendees. Give each attendee a purpose in the meeting with a role to fulfill. Think summarizing tasks or performing meeting administrative duties, such as delivering project status updates or sharing stakeholder perceptions. This approach is a win-win because it relieves some project management workload while increasing meeting engagement.
  • Use polling and collect opinions.  Most video platforms offer built-in polling tools. Even a quick two-question poll at the start of a topic can re-engage participants.  Also, real-time reactions — thumbs up, raised hands, emoji responses — give introverted attendees a low-stakes way to contribute.  Seeing input reflected on screen signals to attendees that their participation is expected and valued.
  • Use silence to generate high-quality participation. Remain silent after posing a question. This allows participants to think before responding. The richness of information and viewpoints improves when participants aren’t pressured to provide immediate answers.
  • Use the chat window. Pose questions and ask participants for reactions or ideas after a speaker has finished. This creates a second layer of engagement without interrupting the meeting flow. Assign someone to monitor the chat and ensure notable contributions are shared before topic transition points.  This approach also helps team members joining from noisy environments who feel uncomfortable unmuting.
  • Use small virtual rooms to support focused discussion. Use breakout rooms and allocate specific questions or tasks to each sub-group. This injects energy into the meeting and makes reporting back to the entire group feel purposeful. Even five minutes in a small group can give people ownership of significant topics and expand the viewpoints available to all participants.
  • Close in a meaningful way. Ask everyone for a word or short phrase that captures their takeaway from the meeting. This ensures everyone speaks at least once, reinforces accountability, and helps the project manager determine if the meeting satisfied its purpose. It also creates a more memorable meeting closure than asking “any last questions?” ever will.

Have you discovered other ways to keep people engaged in virtual meetings? If so, please share with us in the comments. We all need as many tools as we can get to run good meetings, whether in person or online.

 

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 104,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Fine-Tuning Scope for Project Success

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Fine-Tuning Scope for Project SuccessThe fate of most projects is determined long before the first task is assigned. It’s decided early on during conversations where scope is shaped. Getting scope right while drafting the Project Charter doesn’t just avoid problems later on; it builds the case for why the project deserves to exist. Check out these approaches to help you define scope in a way that maximizes success. 

  • Tie scope to the business problem or opportunity, not the proposed.  Invest time in defining the problem or business opportunity. Clearly determine what’s broken, who is affected, and the cost of doing nothing. Scope that’s built from a well-defined problem is easier to justify to sponsors and stakeholders. And it’s typically easier to trim or adjust if needed without losing the project’s core benefits. 
  • Engage end users early to validate assumptions before scope is set. Scope defined entirely by sponsors and subject matter experts often contains blind spots. Evaluate these areas by involving people who do the day-to-day work. Bringing end users into early scoping conversations identifies constraints, workflow realities, and other needs that would otherwise emerge later, increasing cost and risk.  
  • Compare scope size with available capacity. Before the scope is finalized, test it against the team’s capacity to deliver the project. Assess competing priorities, skill gaps, and the ever-present demands of team members’ day jobs.  If the scope cannot be delivered with the available resources within the defined timeframe, refine it early. Don’t make an unreasonable commitment with the intention of figuring things out when the time comes. A smaller, well-scoped project that succeeds is worth far more to an organization and to project management credibility than an ambitious one that causes day-to-day business issues.
  • Use a phased scope to separate must-haves from desirables.  Work with stakeholders to explicitly prioritize scope into categories. Three potential categories are: a) Minimum Viable Product (MVP) items – mandatory items for the project to achieve its core objective, b) important items that are useful if capacity allows, and c) nice-to-haves that can be deferred. This structure not only sharpens the business case by keeping the core investment focused but also gives you a principled way to manage scope if time or cost constraints tighten.
  • Stress-test scope with your delivery team before sign-off. Before the scope is formally baselined, bring in the delivery team for a formal review. Look to identify requirements that are ambiguous, technically risky, or dependent on factors outside the team’s control. Try to identify areas of complexity and compare the risk of complexity against the potential business benefit. Delivery teams involved in scope definition are usually energized and feel greater ownership and clarity. And that clarity can mean faster project launches and fewer misaligned expectations.

Grab the scope from a current or past project and use these steps to evaluate the scope. If it’s a past project, would these approaches have helped avoid some of issues you experienced? 

 

For more about project scope, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 104,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Is Email a Communication Tool?

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Is Email a communication tool 414

 

Spoiler alert! Email isn’t a communication tool. In this video, Bob McGannon and I explain why email isn’t good for communication and what it is good for. We also describe the best way to use email (as well as other text-based tools).

 

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 104,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Don’t Play Favorites with Stakeholders

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Don’t Play Favorites with StakeholdersPlaying favorites with stakeholders causes all sorts of problems and makes your job as project manager more difficult. Taking an impartial stance with all stakeholders and their requirements is the way to go. Here’s why: 

  • Project success is founded on trust. Favoritism destroys it. When stakeholders sense that you’re closer to some stakeholders, confidence in the project management process drains away. Why should they trust you, when they aren’t sure whether your decisions are made on merit or on relationships? Without trust, you’ll spend more time and energy managing politics than the project.
  • All stakeholders feel listened to when you’re impartial. When stakeholders feel heard, they’re more likely to support ALL project objectives, not just their own. You can increase stakeholder support by truly understanding their issues and concerns and then communicating those to your project team.  
  • Every stakeholder has a significant contribution to make. A project requirement that seems less important might turn out to be a critical dependency. Bring equal curiosity and thoroughness to all parties and their viewpoints. If you dismiss or deprioritize some voices, you risk blind spots that could require costly rework.  
  • Impartiality helps maintain your credibility. Projects always involve some conflict. When stakeholder disputes arise, your ability to successfully mediate depends on them seeing you as impartial. If you’re known for playing favorites, your career as mediator is over.
  • Disgruntled stakeholders can present significant risks. Stakeholders who feel ignored are still important to your project. They don’t disappear, but they might disengage, escalate, or turn into project detractors. I’ve seen late-stage projects derailed by a stakeholder who wasn’t listened to in the planning phase and came back to torpedo the project at the worst possible moment – during implementation. Proactive, equitable treatment of stakeholders is much easier than uphill relationship management.

Have you seen someone in your work world play favorites? How did that make you feel? And how did other people react to it? On the other hand, have you seen other benefits when you or another project manager has been an impartial arbiter in stakeholder dealings? Share with us in the comments section! 

For more about stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s, Managing Project Stakeholders course.

 

Coming Up

Many different audiences make up a project team, from the project sponsor and customer to numerous stakeholders, to various teams that take on the work in the work breakdown structure. These audiences often need different information, prefer different communication methods and frequencies, and come with unique perspectives and idiosyncrasies. I’m a big believer in effective communication, so I’m looking forward to this conversation with Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes. I hope you’ll join us on Friday, April 10, 2026 at 11am MT/1pm ET. Click here to join!

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 104,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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