Steve Bather has been facilitating remote and hybrid events for decades. And when I asked him to share a hybrid-meeting success story for my forthcoming ebook he took me straight back to the Noughties.
It very much highlights that the challenges of hybrid gatherings aren’t new!
Steve said: “I was supporting a large organisation’s global sales team. They wanted their call once a month to be the focal point for the whole team, where they could discuss everything that was going on globally around this account, and then bounce ideas off each other and work and so on, but they couldn’t get people to join the call.
“We came up with the idea of it being like a radio phone-in – and by naming it something different, and a little bit more exciting, we’d suddenly given ourselves a whole new sort of landscape to work on.
“So we had part of the meeting room converted into a studio: we made sure we had decent screens, microphones, and the tech in the room worked.
“And this was quite a radical thing: people could join online, on their computers – we were using WebEx. And they were also very welcome to come in, and be in the room, at the office.”
The format was 90 minutes, once a month, and people would compete to bag one of the 20-minute segments. Within the segment, not more than ten minutes would be a presentation, and the rest a discussion.
Participants could comment in writing throughout the event, using a decision-support tool called ThinkTank (nowadays, Steve uses XLeap.) Computers were provided for the in-the-room group to facilitate this.
The first edition attracted about 35 participants, but very quickly it developed to attracting most of the target group of 65 participants, about a dozen of whom would attend in-the-room. An edited highlights reel was provided for those who couldn’t attend in real time, but most of the team did.
“It became what we had imagined, which was the place that they needed to go every month, and it ran for about two and a half, three years before people moved on and the budgets moved,” Steve said.
“It’s nearly 20 years ago now but I still refer to that case study on many occasions, and think back fondly about the bravery with which that organisation took that on. When organisations would do a sort of a modification or a dilution, you’d get a diluted effect. And therefore, you don’t get to actually experiment and test and try different things, and find out what really works.”