Encouraging Employee Attendance at Optional Meetings

You’ve set a time for a meeting, but chose not to make employee attendance mandatory. Not surprisingly, the people who most needed to hear the information decided not to show up.

It’s a scenario that’s all-too-familiar, as employee attendance can be difficult to encourage. If you’re planning a gathering, try these techniques to “up” the employee attendance:

1. Make the Meeting Mandatory

If you really believe that employee attendance is going to be low, you can always make the meeting mandatory; however, if you do, you’ll have to figure out how to “penalize” those who don’t show up. Additionally, you’ll need to make sure there is an employee attendance sign-up sheet at the event; otherwise, someone might assert that they were there when they actually weren’t.

2. Offer Perks

There’s nothing wrong with offering special “perks” for employee attendance. For instance, if your team members come to a lunch-and-learn about sales techniques, perhaps they’ll get free pizza and will be able to leave 30 minutes early that day. Such little employee attendance “rewards” may seem juvenile, but they honestly work on people of all ages.

3. Make Meetings Enjoyable

Sometimes, the reason your employee attendance is low is because your discussions have a habit of turning into boring lectures. However, if you get a reputation for presenting dynamic give-and-take sessions, your employee attendance rate is likely to increase.

4. Assign Topic Areas

Clyde always missing meetings? Hilda often late or a “no show”? Then why not put him or her in charge of the next meeting you have? That way, the burden of employee attendance will be on someone else. And Clyde or Hilda might just have a better way of encouraging employee attendance than you.

5. Ask for Feedback

Finally, don’t forget to ask your coworkers about the waning employee attendance. You might be surprised to learn that they have creative ideas on upping employee attendance… but you’ll never know until you bring up the subject!