How to pivot your in-person gathering to remote in 1 week
Need to suddenly shift your in-person gathering (training, workshop, company town hall, off-site, keynote) back to remote?
While it may be tempting to simply replicate our in-person plan, or recite our slides by rote, the pandemic taught us we can do better. Our attendees expect us to do better as well.
Pivot once again we must. Here’s a playbook on how to:
Switch from in-person gathering to remote if you only have one week
Pivot without sacrificing what makes gathering worthwhile: connection and engagement.
How to know if it’s ok to cancel. Hint: it really can be!
What to do before attendees show up (log on)
1. Prime attendees
Athletes warm up before an event, so should attendees. Remember: Gatherings are an opportunity to do something with people, not at them. Otherwise, they can just read the slides (more on this later). Small gestures pull instead of push them in, give them skin in the game, and signal to your attendees you need their thinking so they feel seen.
If you have a week:
Send a pre-read: Let’s stop giving pre-reads a bad rap. In addition to warming up your attendees to the material, sending articles, data, videos, etc ahead of time can also save valuable time in the gathering. It’s important to share the ‘why’ of the pre-read — what is the unique role you want attendees to play, and why is coming prepared important?
Just sending out articles to read can feel like a compliance task if you don’t take this extra step. Also, ensure whoever is leading the gathering has already completed the pre-read. If you ask attendees to share pre-read reflections be sure whoever is leading the gathering has or will do so too.
Pro-tip: Begin the gathering by sharing a few of people’s reflections. This gesture helps people feel they were listened to and that their work and responses matter.
Create a worksheet: Adult learners come with experience, so, use it! Creating and sending a worksheet based on the gatherings’ material puts the attendee in the lead role.
2. Pre-event communication:
In addition to communicating the change in the channel from in-person to virtual, be strategic about why you communicate to attendees before the event.
If you have a week: Great gatherers know to focus on the moment as much as the material. This is especially true in a virtual gathering when it’s more likely attendees can get the material on their own.
Consider the typical pre-gathering email that includes basic facts and a light agenda (message only):
“Tomorrow is our Town Hall. It starts at 4 pm. We will be joined by [insert name] to talk about [insert topic] followed by a discussion on our financials. Looking forward to it — see you there”.
Sure, attendees know what they’ll be listening to but it’s less clear why they should attend.
Ensure your messages highlights what is unique about the moment as well by:
Elevating your attendees to let them know they are necessary to the gathering’s success, by creating mutual accountability and a strong in-group.
Explaining what makes this gathering special.
Try something like, “Tomorrow is our Town Hall. I’m very excited to see you all there. I rely on your feedback and contributions to tell me and our leaders what resonates and what we should do more of. This is the first time we’ll be sharing our Q4 financials and what it means for our growth plans. Thanks for clearing your schedules to attend — it means a lot that this is one time the whole company is together — even if it’s virtually.”
How to open your gathering
1. Housekeeping:
In an in-person gathering, we may verbalize the housekeeping odds-and-ends like when breaks will be, or where the restrooms are located. Housekeeping for remote gatherings is just as important.
Just as we clean a room so we can relax and not worry, some simple housekeeping can calm the nervous system, reduce the uncertainty and anxiety levels of attendees so they can truly pay attention to your gathering. No mess, no stress.
If you have a week: Send the housekeeping information ahead of time as an additional reminder. Share instructions on how attendees can prepare as well. Here’s a great example from the event marketing firm, Splash.
An example of gathering housekeeping from Event Marketing Firm, Splash
2. Sharing the agenda
Typically our agenda slides are a list of topics only shown once at the beginning of the gathering. This isn’t the most brain-friendly choice. Our brains like certainty and being able to predict what’s next. It’s like knowing where the dips are on a rollercoaster before you buckle your harness.
If you have a week:
Typical agendas only highlight the content you’re sharing. This also makes it easy for people to tune out when the section isn’t relevant to them, especially virtually. Here are a few ways to focus on the outcome instead:
Tell attendees what they will walk away with and what will be different from your time together
Instead of a list of sessions or topics, share the what, the how, and the why. “Here’s what you’ll walk away with, here’s how we’re going to get there, and why this matters to you”.
Instead of the topics, think of your agenda like a recipe. What is each step leading your attendees towards — show them how all of the topics connect to one another and what the final product is.
It’s ok to give people a peek behind your process — they’ll be wondering where you’re headed so you might as well tell them.
3. Give people a role
If we don’t need our attendees, there is less of a reason to gather them. It’s not only the experience that’s unique when we gather — our attendees are too. Here’s how to invite others in from the start.
If you have a week: Perfect your opening question.
Questions (and a genuine interest in the answer) help invite others in, especially at the beginning of your gathering. After sharing the agenda, ask:
What does this topic make you think about?
Is there anything you don’t see here you were hoping to learn?
What do I need to know about you or this group?
Rather than plow through the material, turn the gathering from a solo into a duet with a simple opening question. Note, this doesn’t mean you need to wildly change your plan or the slide deck.
What to do throughout
Sprinkle in these techniques over the course of your gathering to up connection.
If you have a week:
When we are remote we miss important visual cues. Share instructions for an activity with slides, not just your words so that people can refer back to them.
We often rely on other attendees and their reactions to tell us how to feel about something. This is one reason why comedy specials are filmed in front of a live audience, and why Saturday Night Live cut to Tom Hanks, Paul Rudd, and Tina Fey’s reactions to jokes in the Weekend Update section. Consider using the pin tool in Zoom to highlight (with permission) a few attendees’ reactions to a content-heavy section.
Audience reactions, like these from a recent episode of Saturday night live, teach us how to feel about the material being shared.
How to close your gathering
We often digest or debrief in-person gatherings in hallways or on our way out. We need to leave space for connection in a remote setting as well. Digestion and debriefing help attendees retain and recall information.
There are many ways to leave space for connection. We draw material closer to us when we’re encouraged to use our own experience and share it. It can be done with a simple question or prompt or even a breath.
If you have a week: Design your debrief.
Debriefs are like throwing a fishing line to your attendees — they don’t need to grab on but we should still give them an opportunity to try. Ask in chat, in a breakout, or with a volunteer, questions like:
What did you notice? What stands out? What’s confusing? What did you learn? What will you do differently as a result of what you learned today?
How to know if you should just cancel
Our natural inclination when we pivot from in-person to remote is to either stuff more content in, or to reduce our content.
Instead ask, do we need to gather at all? Despite its allure and potential, gathering may not be necessary, even when we crave it most.
Ask yourself, what’s the effect you’re after, and then follow the motto: pull together, push apart.
If your desired effect is to help people comply or to inform, it’s likely you can shift to asynchronous communication. Especially in a virtual setting, save your synchronous time and energy for when you really need engagement, buy-in, or behavior change.
Virtual and in-person gatherings are not the same. They can’t be. But what is the same is what people want — connection.
COVID has shown us we want to be together, but we also want it to be meaningful.
We may think it’s harder to connect virtually, this is why we blame Zoom or focus our efforts on keeping people from being distracted.
Technology or lack thereof doesn’t propel or fuel connection, it’s us and our choices.
The sudden and abrupt switch to remote means we have an opportunity to make new choices: give attendees a role, help them become active co-creators, and remember that even virtually, especially virtually, gatherings are an opportunity to do things with people, not at them.
Only have 24 hours to pivot? Here’s what to do…
Lindsey Caplan is a screenwriter turned organizational psychologist who helps HR & business leaders create experiences that boost motivation, engagement, and performance