A Shared Experience

A Hybrid Experience for a Global Team

The Event

• Miller Tanner Associates (MTA) hosts an annual Workshop bringing together its global team from Europe, Asia, North America and South America. The Workshop is designed to provide departmental and company-wide training, skill building, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, teambuilding events, and networking opportunities.

The Challenge

• This year’s face-to-face event was threatened by pandemic travel restrictions. Given the uncertainty of the pandemic’s potential impact, the team decided to shift the Workshop to a hybrid format to accommodate any concerns that could arise.
• By shifting to a hybrid 3-day format, the challenge then emerged as to how to connect and engage the two audiences, virtual and in-person. Such challenges included:
  • Creating a shared experience for both the virtual and face-to-face teams.
  • Strategically planning an event that would meaningfully engage remote attendees located in multiple global time zones.
  • Synchronizing the experience using a hybrid format.

The Highlights

• With a limited budget and pandemic challenges, MTA used their expertise and creative agility to design an innovative hybrid event solution that would provide a meaningful experience for both the in-person audience and the virtual audience.
• For this hybrid event, MTA designed a focused agenda for both audience types consisting of 4 hours of sessions each day for both audiences, with in-person sessions scheduled for the afternoon in order to maximize engagement and delivery.
• Once the agenda was determined, our team designed a customized virtual platform to enhance the overall quality to deliver a seamless shared experience between the virtual and the face-to-face audiences.
• Interactive agenda with built-in virtual meeting rooms for easily accommodating the virtual attendees during collaborative breakout sessions and departmental sessions
• Gamification – friendly competition for both audiences through gamification, which integrated the Social Wall, quizzes, knowledge assessments, feedback, content collection, and more
• Push notifications for real-time announcements
• Networking and chat functionality
• Skilled Production: speakers’ presentations were livestreamed to our remote audience. In turn, the remote audience was livestreamed on screen in the meeting room for more interaction with the live audience and presenters.
• Breakout sessions were managed through our experience platform to integrate both audiences.