How Brands Creatively Hosted Virtual Offsite Meetings
As the world continues to move in a remote-first direction, it’s important to consider how to make your company’s in-person events remote-friendly.
Even if you don’t always do remote events, the remote option is great for anytime your team is spread around the world.
But, a virtual offsite meeting? Sounds oxymoronic. How can you have an offsite, that doesn’t feel like work, virtually?
In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into how these brands thought about virtual offsites in a creative way. And didn’t just ask everyone to be on Zoom for 8 hours.
1. Loom VR Virtual Offsite
At the end of 2020, Loom decided to host a virtual offsite. What made this different than attending an 8-hour Zoom meeting?
Well, first, the company sent VR headsets to their team to allow employees to feel like they were leaving their homes for a large company meeting they used to travel for.
We just announced our @loom offsite being done in VR and us shipping everyone an Oculus headset. The smiles. 🙂
— Vinay Hiremath (@vhmth)
December 10, 2020
According to Loom, “with virtual reality, we were able to send everyone an Oculus Quest 2 headset to bring the virtual world to them. Plus, we were able to limit Zoom content to only two hours per day to keep the content engaging.”
Once they got started with virtual reality, they had to find virtual reality apps to host their events. But they also included their employees in the planning process. The company sent a Google Form to employees to share any ideas for activities and sessions they could do during the virtual offsite.
Loom worked with a partner to create a virtual reality island where team members could go for watercooler conversations, ice breakers, and happy hour.
Interestingly, the virtual reality component was not mandatory. Any events that were VR exclusives were optional. And the VR island they created was also accessible via desktop, so everyone could participate.
It’s important to remember that when you’re creating a virtual offsite experience, you want everyone to be able to show up. Hopefully, the tools you use will be available on several devices or you can make those events not mandatory if it takes a special device.
The team also created unstructured time during their day so that people working from home could still do their normal work and activities.
2. First Round Review Interactive Virtual Offsite
Another company thinking about virtual offsites creatively is First Round Review.
First Round Review held a virtual offsite and had activities including group meals, cooking competitions, self-reflection exercises, group presentations, unconference events, and more.
The company knew that they wanted to use all different kinds of formats for their activities so that they could keep people’s attention.
Before they planned the event, they wrote down their objectives, breaking them into task- and team-focused outcomes. Then, they came up with ideas to achieve …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
