Maximizing Engagement: A Successful In Person Event for 200 Homeworkers

The new normal created by the pandemic, plus the advent of cloud based collaboration technology, has seen the migration of staff from office spaces, creating an increasingly disparate and remote workforce.

How can business leaders create a sense of team in this new landscape?

Plenary suite for up to 250 guests

An obvious solution is to pull everyone together to gather in person every now and again.

One such 'in person' gathering was a planning meeting, hosted by a large telecommunications company, for over 200 of their homeworkers.

Supported by their leadership team, this event was three days of intense planning meetings, team building exercises and some out of hours social events to link things together.

The clear objective was to set out a detailed operational strategy for the next half year.

Hosted in large multi room venue, the client took over the whole site for the entirety of the three day event.

There was one large plenary room for gathering the entire team in one place.

A further two medium sized breakout rooms, which, along with the main room, allowed three simultaneous meetings for each of the core subject streams.

Medium Breakout room 1

Staff were then further divided up into 'squads', each of whom could work in a variety of smaller meeting spaces to flesh out the details.

At the conclusion of each session, the squad lead would report back to the stream in the main breakout rooms, and then summaries were presented in the main plenary room at the end of each day.

External team members could join any of the sessions using MS-Teams calls.

Notes, suggestions and chat boards could be shared using the clients online workspace and collaboration software, and users could log onto Slido for event specific question sharing.

The main room was set up to allow any external participant to contribute at any time via MS-Teams, allowing people both those on site and the remote audience to fully collaborate with any aspect of the event.

Using analytics from the various software platforms, and recording all calls on MS-Teams, provided the leadership team the means to review all input after the event.

Whilst from an Audio Visual perspective, each room was technically quite simple, there were a lot of moving parts across the large multi room site. And with so many users connecting to different screens, and a mix of PC and Mac laptops to add to the fun, Confidence Digital staff were kept busy providing all aspects of tech support to everyone across the entire site.

The project specification reflected the informal nature of what was ultimately an internal staff working party, so the emphasis was on being flexible and providing technical solutions as the need came up, rather than delivering a pre planned 'show'.

Medium Breakout room 2

In each of the three larger rooms we provided:

• A suitable sound system

• Cameras for capturing a large audience

• Professional slide clickers for presenters at the lectern

• A video switcher to easily connect any of the clients own laptops into the screens.

All laptops, cloud software, and MS-Teams accounts were provided by the client.

The venue has screens installed in each room, so all we needed to do was patch our equipment in. Internet connection and Wi-Fi coverage was also provided by the venue.

It was fairly hectic at the beginning of each session, when multiple users were asking for help at the same time, but once we got everyone up and running, we could breathe a little and prepare for the next recap and summary session.

It was three busy but enjoyable few days, made easier by a lovely bunch of people both from client and venue, all of whom were an absolute delight to work with.

To discuss how we can support your next event, get in touch hello@confidence-digital.com