Practical Advice for Pulling Off a 150-Person Virtual Offsite

Cancelled. 

Like many organizations did in the first half of 2020, our client, a fast-growing biotech firm, cancelled its 150-person off-site scheduled to take place in April for the company’s “top 5%.”

But they didn’t wait until it was safe to bring people together in person. Instead, they decided that what they needed from their leaders was too important. So, they re-scheduled the event for two months later and they committed to all-virtual delivery. 

With Exember’s support, they re-grouped and delivered a 3-day all-virtual event in June that participants raved was “extremely impactful”, “makes me feel more connected to our leadership team”, “strengthened internal networks moving forward”, and was “just the right length and mix of plenary sessions and breakouts to keep people engaged”.

Next level offsites like this have traditionally been the bread-and-butter of engaging leadership. Many organizations make these events an annual ritual where executives share an aligned, and hopefully inspiring, point of view on “where we need to go and what we need from you to get there.”

COVID has both raised the importance of engaging “next levels of leadership” like this and curtailed its feasibility. There are so many questions and valid concerns: Is it possible to create the same “buzz” that you get from being together in-person? What are the real limitations of a virtual off-site? What are the new possibilities that are unlocked when we’re not constrained to a physical space? Will it be worse to go for it and blow it than to let this leadership engagement channel go?

Yet, this vehicle is more essential than ever. In a period where many are working from home, people crave the opportunity to speak with their colleagues about those topics that matter most – our purpose, how we win now, how we each grow as leaders. We must do more to break the monotony of back-to-back transactional meetings. And the good news is that virtual 100+-person offsites are do-able and in some ways, better.

This article shares some insights from our biotech example and many other virtual “off-sites” we’ve designed and delivered for clients over the past few years. We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to do this, and we wanted to share both high-level principles and practical advice about how to pull these off successfully.

Principle 1 - This feels like producing a TV show.

The lead up is everything. 90% of the success of your event will be determined by the time it starts. As much as mature companies are used to doing minute-by-minute planning for in-person events, you’ll find that meticulous planning is even more crucial when you’re planning a virtual event where even one speaker with bad Wi-Fi can hurt your entire meeting. Here are some practical tips for the weeks leading UP TO the event:

• Light but realistic speaker prep. Make sure your speakers are set up to succeed. You can prep speakers on a slow burn in the 4-8 weeks leading up to the event. But make sure all of them PRACTICE on the platform like it’s “the real thing” so they can get as realistic a test run as possible. You want to avoid (real, painful) situations like one executive having bad lighting that compromises visibility and expressiveness. So make sure you have one technical run-through under game-time conditions.
• Choose a platform that meets your needs, but don’t over analyze it. Zoom is emerging as the de-facto platform for day-to-day virtual meetings. But the moment you look for something a little more “enterprise strength” and bulletproof for larger audiences, you’ll find a confusing explosion of platforms that all claim to be able to make your event special. VBrick, Vidizmo, Qumu, Ooyala, BlueJeans, AnyMeeting, Adobe Connect. The list goes on and on. We’ve been through the exercise of creating a big excel sheet comparing and contrasting over a dozen of them. At the end of the day, you just want to make sure that your platform can deliver what you need - high-quality video, compliance to your company’s regulations, and support for interactive tools that you want to bring into the design. This is especially true in your earliest ventures into large virtual offsites. Start with something that you know, whatever that is, and can deliver the basics. Then you can ramp up to more interactive functionality in other platforms.
• Create presentation redundancy. No matter how much you prepare and take assistance from IT professionals, there will be a possibility of Wi-Fi dropping out. You cannot afford to have a single point of failure for either the presenter or the content. For every speaker and activity, think through who else could present the ideas and where to store the presentation, in case someone drops out just at the wrong time and with little notice.
• Co-create the meeting with a small but dedicated design committee. This works best when the committee is both part of design and execution. When you have a small group of team members who have “skin in the game”, combined with true support from the executive team, you can create something that feels truly “built by us for us” and not wholly outsourced to some outside firm, which we strongly believe is a formula for success (even as an outside firm ourselves!).

Principle 2: Not “just another virtual meeting” please.

With so many of your people in back-to-back virtual meetings all day, your event has to feel differentiated, special, and not “just another Zoom meeting”. While there are many more, below are our principles and favorite go-to moves to create a unique experience:

• Fewer speakers, more interaction – To keep participants engaged, especially in an all-virtual world, you want to find ways to get participants engaging with the content (simple polling, question voting) or even better, talking to each other in breakouts where they go from passive listening to reflection and debate. Choreographing the experience is more art than science but paying attention to the desired energy, alignment, mindsets, and post-event behaviors should guide your final design.
• Overnight synthesis – Create an experience that feels organic and shows them their input is being heard and applied. Gathering real-time input from participants isn’t hard to do. If you have smaller breakouts, you can leverage a Google Doc or even something as simple as a facilitator capturing notes into a PowerPoint slide. Then at the end of the day, you can summarize, synthesize, and bring this information into the next day’s design.
• Make activities “personal enough” – There is power in personalizing the experiences to their own day-to-day realities. Beyond understanding the strategic or cultural ideas, people want to know how it resonates with their own experience and how they can implement the ideas. As one example, we asked senior-level participants to share stories from earlier in their careers where culture mattered. Overnight, we summarized and then presented the next day, the most frequently-mentioned examples and asked them how they want to show up for their own people when faced with the same challenging, yet culture-defining, moments.

Principle 3: There are new positions on the team.

You might think with meetings going virtual, that the execution team would be smaller than for in-person, where you had crowd-control and refreshments roles. But that’s not quite true. There are actually a few NEW roles to play. Above and beyond the usual, obvious ones (e.g. speakers, meeting designers, and breakout facilitators), here are some less obvious “positions” you’ll want to consider for your virtual event delivery team:

• Overall MC – With everyone focused on their job, someone has to play (for fans of Jeopardy) the important role of Alex Trebek to make sure that there is the right tone throughout the meeting, playing voice of god (“we will be starting in five minutes”), adjusting to any number of “wobblers” that can derail the event, setting up what’s coming next, and “filling in” if there is an issue with any speaker. The show must go on, which is what the MC ensures.
• Technology/platform support – If your company hasn’t done a meeting of this size before, people will be nervous and technical issues WILL occur. Make sure you create a separate channel for IT support for participants. Your support person(s) may even have a second computer set up with a remote assistance session running and a mobile phone where they can immediately help anyone having trouble OUTSIDE the meeting that’s running.
• Behind-the-scenes coordinator – a colleague summed this up well, “it’s a crazy hard job!” Don’t underestimate what this takes, but also what a difference this makes.  We truly believe that for the biotech event, the young manager playing this role was the #1 reason it went well. From ensuring people got cleanly into 20 breakouts, making sure all speakers knew their role, to handling a flurry of questions every day, to getting outputs saved to the right shared drive, this was a full-time job. Clearly, this person needs to fully understand the process mechanics of the activities and their requirement for virtual delivery. They will also need to prepare a number of documents (minute-by-minute timelines, roles, contact information, breakout group participants). For this unique role, you need someone with the right mix of calm-under-pressure, see-what-might-go-wrong, service mentality, and a little dash of courage to make sure things go smoothly on the day of the event.
• Speaker “concierge” – If you have high-profile speakers (internal or external), you may want someone on standby to make sure their (usually reasonable, sometimes not) needs are met. From last-minute demands like “change this slide, now!” and VIP technical support, understanding of the full meeting agenda, and emotional support, it helps to have a separate person on hand for your most important speakers.

Principle 4: Momentum still matters. A lot.

This is the most important principle if your goal is to create real impact vs. just delivering a “great event” (which also counts, by the way). So often we see companies bring “all hands-on deck” to work late hours, plan and pull off an event like this with little to no thought given to ensuring post-event momentum.

• Tell them what’s next. Just having any sort of follow-up is valuable because it proves to participants, you’re serious and willing to commit to seeing real change happen. For the biotech client, they actually did something great that we often don’t see. They created a structure for momentum, a cohort-based program supported by dedicated coaches to focus on both their own growth and ensuring ownership for the commitments they made together at the three-day event. 
• Internalization and personalization. We think one of the signs of a well-designed event is when you can take participants on a journey from “this is really interesting stuff!” to “this is what and how I need to change!” Easier said than done. A lot easier. But a couple methods we’ve seen work are having a structure like the cohort-program mentioned above and pairing them up, making personal commitments, and asking each pair to get out their phones and put a check-in on the calendar with each other 30 days in the future.
• Guiding principles are fantastic. We’re convinced that a small set of “how we roll” principles is one of the most powerful things to come out of an event like this. Giving an organization a common language to talk about their purpose and expectations for each other can be incredibly impactful – these often take the form of a company’s values, success drivers, or leadership commitments that are well understood, and that the organization fights hard to make more than just words on a poster.
• If you asked for input, make it count. Frequently, both in-person and virtual offsites include questions to participants. These could be solicited any number of ways, including polls during the broadcast or break out discussions. More often than not, you will be capturing the inputs within the polling technology, submission of decks to a shared location, or in live documents like Google Docs. Participants are often left wondering “What happened with that stuff you asked us? Did it matter? Did it influence you?” You should summarize polling data, key themes, quotes, word clouds for participants. You can also go further and come back to the group with insights you gained from their input and share how your strategy, culture or operations might be influenced by their submissions, so they understand why their engagement mattered.

So, what happened with the biotech client that decided to convert their annual in-person leadership off-site to an all-virtual session? Application of practices related in this article provided some serious benefits, including:

• Connective tissue during challenging times. At the time of the event, the organization had been on mandated “work-from-home” for over three months. In survey feedback, we were surprised by how many people simply appreciated the investment in spending time with each other, which is something that you can do more frequently and quite easily if you want to. This event helped create engagement, alignment, and excitement for the top 5% who the rest of the organization looks to for leadership.
• A united executive presence. Most people had lots of exposure to their direct functional leader. But by hearing from all executive speakers sharing “personal enough” stories, they were able to see the quilt that made up their leadership team, showcased in an authentic and accessible way. Their C-Level team also took part in all of the breakout activities which showed participants that this was also important to the people at the top.
• Buy-in and ownership for their newly launched leadership principles. We spent much of the second day having candid conversations about the expectations that the organization spent months creating in a bottoms-up effort. Rather than mandate “thou shalt” from the top, we had the participants reflect on questions like which ones felt easier vs. harder given the current culture of the organization, what challenges and tensions they imagine needing to overcome in order to live by them, and the moments where they believed they had the biggest opportunity to role model “what great looks like” for their people.

In summary, this event catalyzed a mindset shift at the company from one where they felt culture had to come from the very top of the organization to “I own this”.

But also, while it may sound soft, one of the things executives appreciated most was an opportunity to reinforce how much they cared about their people, hearing their opinions about continuing success and making it a great place to work. 

In times where most interactions are transactional and human interaction has been more incidental, people felt an injection of “we care about you personally and about us as a community”.

Partnering with Exember, the client created a sense of ownership, optimism, and connection among their top leaders.

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By Eric Wong, Daniel Levitt, and Lauren Grimshaw.