Here at Rees McCann, we’re all about creating highly-engaging events and other gatherings, where people actively participate.
So when I’m asked to help design a hybrid event, my early questions are all about engagement and participation. How can we make the event great for everyone involved?
Let me explain how we tackle the challenge. For simplicity, I’ll just pay attention to the two main groups of real-time participants, Roomies and Zoomies.
Communication Inequality
For a lot of our clients, equity is important. “We want the remote people to be able to participate in the same way as the people in the room,” they say.
When I dig a little deeper, the client is often thinking in terms of Zoomies being able to submit questions via chat. “But what about their ability to network? That’s one of the main reasons people attend events,” I’ll ask.
The thing is, communication inequality is the reality of the hybrid format.
Humans have a proximity bias: they have a preference for people (and things) that are physically close, and pay them more attention than those that are far away. So Roomies tend to forget about the remote attendees, while Zoomies get distracted by their cats or kids.
Similarly, everyone has an in-group bias: they tend to favour people who seem to be like themselves. Roomies, therefore, tend to prefer other roomies, while the Zoomies may form their own counter-clique.
The groups are separated by different cultural practices. For example, remote attendees typically use a typed meeting chat system, while those in the room rarely do so.
Roomies may lean forward to indicate that they want to speak, Zoomies might need to use the “hand raise” feature in the video platform.
Whatever event experience the groups each have, it certainly won’t be “the same”.
Refreshments, Informality and Timing
And, notice this crucial set of cultural differences, especially as they affect Roomies and Zoomies:
- “informal” discussions and associated relationship- building
- food, drink, movement and other physical needs
- the timing and structure of discussions and decision- making.
For the Roomies, these three elements are deeply – perhaps inextricably – linked. For an important discussion, we get together for a whole day (or even more), gathering over coffee, lunch, and dinner. Eating and drinking together builds trust, small-group conversations happen, confidences are shared, and the more we open up to each other the more trust develops. We form a strongly- connected in-group.
For Zoomies, it’s not like that. Our continuous time online together should usually be less than half a day (to avoid Zoom fatigue, cover multiple time zones and allow space to sort our own food, drink and life admin). We get lots of stuff done asynchronously. We build trust by participating in online discussions, often in writing, over days, weeks and months. Then when we get together on Zoom, the timebox and purpose are clearly defined.
It’s no use pretending there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. We can work on equity, but equality just isn’t possible.
Overcoming Hybrid Participation Issues
So, what to do? When we design a hybrid gathering for engagement and participation, we design two gatherings – one for the Zoomies, one for the Roomies.
We use all our techniques to maximise engagement amongst the Zoomies, designing stripy sessions with lots of interactivity, with their own facilitation team.
We plan a lively event for the Roomies. But the two won’t happen in lockstep, time wise, for all the reasons given above.
Alongside the two plans, we’ll carefully create times and spaces in which the two groups can connect: that’s a third piece of planning. That’s the bit that’s toughest: it’s really tricky to get a bunch of Roomies to pay attention to Zoomies, even when the tech is working perfectly.
All of that means that creating a highly-engaging hybrid event is rarely easy, and almost never cheap. Don’t expect it to happen by magic!