How to Encourage People to Attend Large Conference Calls

Communication is imperative to business success. While there are many means of communications used in business, there are only few that can bring staff or employees together to share ideas and plan business strategies – large conference calls being one of the most convenient ways. Unfortunately some people forget, overlook, or even intently avoid joining these meetings which deteriorates its effectivity. Easily avoid communication gap with these 10 easy tips to encourage people to attend your large conference calls:

1. Getting a high attendance is possible when you consider everyone’s schedule and set your conference call at the most favorable time for everyone, or even just the majority. Avoid conflicts, especially special holidays.
2. Develop a concise agenda and distribute it to the invited people ahead of time. Establish the importance of the large event conference call in a way that resonates with them.
3. Only invite the necessary people or departments to join the call.  
4. Respect people’s time and keep the call reasonably short. Create a meeting outline and divide the content accordingly to keep the meeting going and avoid the discussion going off tangents.
5. Make your large conference call worth people’s time. Think of all the other things they could be working on, and make them choose to attend the meeting over other things in general.
6. Get the word out way in advance to get on people’s schedules and mark their calendar to save the date. Send an auto-reminder through email 15 or 30 minutes prior the start time to ensure that everyone gets ready for the call.
7. If the aforementioned step is not enough, you have an option to dial out to attendees who have failed to dial in the call themselves. This is also beneficial for international attendees who prefer not to pay for the brutal long-distance charges. You can either use a conference call service that allows for you to dial out and bring in participants yourself or use an operator provided by the conference call service.
8. Assign roles to other attendees to emphasize the importance of their attendance. Set rotating roles so that everyone will feel included – a vital member of the team.
9. Make your large event calls an exciting thing that people are actually looking forward to attend. Audio conference meetings tend to be dull and monotonous (especially with large groups), but you can easily switch things up with preset audibles that can be quickly accessed via a telephone keypad as an alternative to the usual in-person ice breakers. These fun audibles include applause, drum roll, laughter, cheers, and even the Happy Birthday song, used with a simple press on the telephone keypad.
10. A simple “Thank you” can show appreciation and make attendees feel valued for their presence.

Sometimes despite how much effort you put in to get everyone to show up, some of your colleagues would not be able to join due to a variety of reasons. You can still remedy this though by using a Record and Replay feature where they could playback the call anytime. You can also use this audio recording to request for a conference call transcript for convenience.