> I can't think of anything else where we need engineers to do something by a deadline, and we just resign to the fact that they won't do it unless we sit them in a room and babysit them while they do it
Pretty much anything, unless you're in the engineer's management chain, or you've given them a direct incentive.
It's always been my experience in bigco that people can ignore almost anything that doesn't come from their management chain up until scheduled meetings get involved. Being uncooperative with meetings (declining invites without alternatives; not attending; not participating) are when escalations and complaints start occurring, and there seems to be a silent consensus that this is the standard - as in, if you complain that someone hasn't answered your emails, the standard response you should expect from anyone, including their manager, is "then schedule a meeting."
So, if you need someone to do something, you schedule a "meeting" to block time on their calendar in which they will pay attention to your thing. That includes anything they need to do to prepare, because anything you don't include in that time block isn't part of the meeting and therefore isn't going to get done.
In my experience there is always more work to be done than there is time. That means people have to start prioritizing things, managers breathing down necks over specific things is a priority signal, just like meetings. Reading something doesn't give you much actual production output to show for, so it just doesn't get prioritized.
Then you should schedule two meetings: one in a reading room, at any time that fits each individual calendar, and then later the real one in a meeting room with everyone's involved, at the same time.
We all know the costs of context switching. Why would you unnecessarily introduce two new context switches? Is it because you don't like being told when to read?