5 Tips On How To Increase Engagement And Deliver Outcomes In A Remote World
Engaging your teams or your leads in a remote world comes with additional challenges. People are tired of Zoom meetings, and today’s Zoom fatigue is mainly due to one issue: virtual team events are not taken seriously. Everyone acts as if no preparation was needed, and would usually be multitasking and not 100% engaged.
But you don’t have to put your team inspiration, alignment and reconnection efforts, or your business development activities with strategic accounts on hold because you are remote. There are ways to succeed in organizing winning online events.
There is no big secret, no magic tool, no advanced technology… We’ve organized more than 50 learning expeditions over the past few years, with an average satisfaction score of 9,3 on 10. What has made our offline events successful is exactly what makes our virtual learning expeditions successful.
These are the 5 ingredients to our success:
Preparation, preparation and… preparation
Failure to prepare is the best way to prepare to fail. We usually need at least 6-8 weeks to co-design the event, and to communicate about the event.
We co-design our programs with the client with weekly followups, and make sure our facilitators keep the participants engaged during the event all the time, with a minute by minute dry run of the event.
Involve participants early on
We involve the participants early on and engage them throughout the experience. We help our client communicate about the event a month or two before the D-day to bring momentum.
We can organize assessments before and after, ice-breaking games to engage them from the start, we usually give the participants some homework during the event and facilitate debriefings and workshops after the talks. Participants commit to attend our events and are followed-up on even after the event.
Our debriefing sessions are essential to keep participants proactive during the whole experience
ENGAGING SPEAKERS AND IMPACTFUL CONTENT
What participants love about learning expeditions is to experience the “behind the scenes” of a place, or the customer journey of a product/service. With online events, these are still possible. The speakers can share their experience, with live walkthrough or live demo if it’s relevant, just as they would do it during a physical meeting. And because our events are meant to create deeper connections among the participants as well, we can organize fun networking moments to achieve that outcome (virtual coffee breaks, virtual beer or food tasting…).
“Out of the box” experiences
We involve the participants early on and engage them throughout the experience. We help our client communicate about the event a month or two before the D-day to bring momentum.
We can organize assessments before and after, ice-breaking games to engage them from the start, we usually give the participants some homework during the event and facilitate debriefings and workshops after the talks. Participants commit to attend our events and are followed-up on even after the event.
Showing how the Chinese insurer Ping An Good Doctor One Minute Clinics work during one of our learning expeditions. With live video, that can be done remotely as well.
The Remo tool allows you to recreate the conference experience with unique networking opportunities.
Impeccable logistics = No bugs
With our learning expeditions, logistics is actually a significant part of the effort. In a remote world, the digital tools need to be user-friendly and work perfectly to serve the overall experience. There is a growing number of tools for videoconferencing, collaboration or networking. Some of them are surprisingly good in terms of experience, as they recreate and even improve the experience of co-creation (Miro, for example) or networking (Remo is very impressive!).
TO CONCLUDE
With inspiring content, dynamic facilitators, short sessions and fun networking moments, digital seminars are excellent substitutes to offline events, with considerable advantages: no limitation in the number of participants, and the possibility to have even richer content with speakers from around the world.
