“How to Build a Holiday Celebration That Works For You”
The Gifting of a Virtual Hybrid Holiday Party for Your Team
Have you and your team been looking for new ways to gather, connect, share and celebrate each other, without constraints of time zones, geographic location or other restrictions? Hybrid events allow the opportunity for both a physical and virtual audience to have the same opportunity to participate and engage no matter where they find themselves. For a hybrid team, this solution allows for better overall engagement of your employees and gives them an option to what suits their needs best.
Building an inclusive hybrid event involves thoughtful planning and execution to ensure that everyone, regardless if they are in person or in the comfort of their own home, can fully participate and feel welcome.
Defining hybrid gathering as three separate events in one; an in-person gathering, a virtual gathering, and the moments when the two are connected.
- Priya Parker
Reach your people wherever they are.
The Context
In Fall 2022, we were approached by Lindsey Colquhoun of Orium’s HR team. Orium is North America’s leading consultancy and systems integrator specializing in composable commerce, customer data and retail platform engineering. Orium is a remote-first organization with headquarters in Toronto. Orium wanted to create a holiday event that included all of their employees regardless of where they were located while catering to each person’s comfort level of gathering in-person. With employees across Canada, the US, and Latin America, here’s how we created an inclusive hybrid event that accommodated the needs and interests of every team member:
Understanding your Team & Their Needs
To make a Hybrid gathering attractive and suit the needs of your employees the first objective is to understand why you want to gather and what an ideal Hybrid event looks like for your team. Priya Parker explains in her guide The Art of Hybrid Gathering how answering the following questions can give everyone a better understanding and allow for a more thoughtfully designed event. The following questions to consider are:
What do you want the experience and interaction to be for the in-person guests? What are their roles at this gathering?
What do you want the experience and interaction to be for the online attendees? What are their roles?
Do the two groups need to be connected to each other or can they have simultaneous experiences?
Based on the ratios, where should the center of gravity be for this gathering?
Does this gathering actually need to be hybrid?
2. Choices & Options
Once you have established a better understanding of your team's needs and where everyone is located, you can begin to consider what options to integrate into the event. During the busy season holiday season, giving your employees a choice of events they can attend allows them to sign up for what suits them best.
For Orium’s employees, they were given the option of selecting from one of the following three choices which all took place on the same day:
- The Virtual Event: Attend a virtual iron chef gingerbread-making competition with a custom kit sent directly to their doorstep.
- In-Person Celebration @ Toronto HQ: Attend an in-person celebration at Orium’s Toronto HQ filled with food, drinks & activities.
- In-Person Celebrations across Canada & LATAM: Attend an in-person dinner in a city close to them where an employee hub is located.
3. Accessibility & Registration
In your pre-event registration process, include an accessibility checklist to gauge any special requirements that your attendees might have, such as session interpretation or dietary needs. Knowing people's needs in advance will ensure you have ample time to ensure everyone is accommodated and, as a result, feel a sense of belonging when attending the event.
As an example, for a culinary event, it is essential to ensure each person's dietary needs are accommodated. Your event attendees could have cultural, religious or health-related diet restrictions, and you need to make it easy for them to participate. Our Care/Of team takes pride in accommodating all dietary needs - from Halal to Kosher to Gluten-Free.
4. Reaching Your Team Everywhere
As workforces commit to remote or hybrid work structures, having a team distributed out of the office and across Canada is the new norm. And for virtual employee events, this means developing a strategy to reach participants wherever they are. Care/ Of curated packages are a fantastic way to build excitement, enhance engagement and show appreciation, but you'll need to determine where participants are located and the best way to get packages to each person. Consider what's going into your event packages and how quickly you want them to arrive at their destinations.
Ask yourself: is there anything perishable inside the package? Given the timeline, what third-party courier service is the most economical? How are we going to communicate to participants when their package is arriving? Will we share the tracking numbers? What is the unboxing experience like? In case a package doesn’t arrive, what's the contingency plan?
For our collaboration with Orium, we produced the gingerbread house kits in-house at the Care/Of studio and used FedEx Express to distribute them to employees located across Canada.
5. Hire a Strong Host
Having a strong event host for the both the virtual and in person event is what brings all the pieces together and gets participants excited to connect, share and enjoy the activities. Strong hosts create meaning and direction for your gatherings.
Once you've assigned a strong host to each event, take the time to brief them on the run of show in advance of the event day.
Questions to consider are: what's the flow of the event? Who will be attending? What accessibility accommodations should the host be aware of? Are there breaks built into the event? How will the event open and close? Are there certain question probes the host can use to encourage engagement and thoughtful conversation throughout?
Having hosts who can merge & bring everyone together is essential for making the overall event seamless and equally engaging for everyone.
6. Connecting Everyone
Stitching all the pieces together is where the magic of the hybrid event happens. How can you create a shared moment for connection across the various gatherings?
Having a way to connect the online space and those in the physical space allows for connection across the whole group. For Orium’s event, the team set up a shared Slack channel where employees were encouraged to share photos of their experience. This Slack channel was then broadcast at the in-person event for attendees to get a glimpse into what their colleagues were doing across the globe.
Additionally, CEO of Orium, Jason Cottrell, shared a prerecorded video that was simultaneously shown to all the employees across the globe. Sharing a moment all together as a community creates an intentional energy to honour all the dedicated teammates and celebrate their successes that year.
As we enter this new area of gathering Hybrid events have the opportunity to be refreshing, empowering and create a unique human occasion. As Priya Parker explains in her Guide for Hosting Hybrid Gatherings, we must shift our power in this new era, to be leaders and develop our leadership skills in helping teams come together through thoughtful designs in new innovative ways. Let us help you bring this new skill to you and your team!