5 Steps to Creating an Awesome Company Meeting
Work through these 5 steps to build awesome company meetings, company offsites and team offsites (even if they are "virtual" remote offsites!):
1. Form your theme
Every team or company gathering is an opportunity to highlight, reinforce and develop your company culture. Company culture is underpinned by how effectively its leaders "act out" the company's values as observable behaviours. Considering every company meeting as a culture opportunity is particularly critical if you have a large remote workforce, where the opportunity to physically observe leaders is limited. Even being able to observe leaders via remote video and presentations is impactful - much more so than the typical text communications we're so accustomed to.
With that in mind, form a theme which aligns with your values and current priorities, but is also engaging, interesting and inspirational - from its concept to creative elements. Your theme is critical - it'll inform most of the next 4 steps, especially agenda and content.
Experts tip: Define an objective and agenda to help build out your theme. Check out this video for more info!
2. Design the agenda
What types of sessions will you run? Slide presentations? Talks? Workshops? Hackathons? Social events? Panel sessions? All these options must be considered with a few things in mind.
Firstly, are attendees in person, remote or a mix? Are they watching live or will much of the content be consumed on demand (often a consideration for global companies with employees across time zones). You must choose session formats that are going to work effectively for your audience and how they'll consume it. Ever tried to do a hackathon remotely across different time zones and supporting an "on-demand" element? No, nobody ever has - it'd be a disaster!
Once session formats are in place, you should assign session owners and work with them to draft broad session content descriptions - again using the objective and intention framework discussed in the above video.
When these two things are done, take a step back and look at the agenda as a whole. The last test before moving forward is to make sure it aligns with your theme and overarching objective and intention.
3. Create content
Arguably the most time consuming part - but it doesn't need to be. With a strong theme and broad session objectives and intentions in place, content magic starts to happen! Repetition and recurrence of key content (which is critical to reinforce your key theme) means a lot of sharing between content owners.
And, we're all guilty of death-by-powerpoint at some stage in our careers, right? Well, ease off - have a mandate than no deck should be longer than X amount of slides, or no more than X amount of words per slide. Or even better - don't use slides. Use video, animation, or simply have your influential leaders speak and make a genuine connection, sans-slides.
4. Coach presenters
Yes it's true - not every person can step into the limelight and wow an audience...but most can certainly be coached to improve their ability. Do you have great presenters in your company already? Then get them to run a workshop for others, and have them coach specific individuals who need it. Failing that, hire an outside company for a basic workshop or two on presenting effectively. Or at least ask your presenters to practice.
5. Messaging and promoting your company meeting
Many companies don't do this and it's a missed opportunity. Building and executing an internal messaging campaign leading up to your company or team event can have a huge impact on its success. It builds a sense of inclusivity (particularly with a remote workforce), sets the tone for the event so employees get a sense of how they should show up for it, and allows lots of opportunity for familiarity to build which helps build stronger rapport during the meeting/event.
Just for fun - here’s the opening of a company offsite in Cabo, Mexico in May 2019. I headed up the creative development of the theme, produced and directed this (with the help of an awesome production crew!)
‘till next time -
Clayton 👋
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