WLP253: Online Conferences and Virtual Retreats
This bonus episode continues the conversation between Pilar Orti and Tim Burgess of Shield GEO, looking at what’s been happening in both companies and the events they’ve been involved with. With an explosion of newly online conferences and expos taking place in this later half of the remote revolution year, it’s interesting to compare and contrast the different approaches organisers have opted for.
Pilar took part in the IAF England and Wales annual conference, which was a week-long single track event, taking place online for the first time. A very full programme included murder mysteries and wine tasting, and used Meetup as the hosting platform - with individual events run on Zoom, an interesting combination that worked well, enabling people to drop in and out as they wanted to.
Very differently, taking place around the same time, was Agile Tour London - also run on Zoom, but with the community conversation centred on Slack. Networking included an open Zoom ‘coffee room’ for networking which included planned and spontaneous activities.
Finally, Pilar has just attended Repeople, which used to be the NomadCity event in person in Gran Canaria, They used Hopin as a platform - which worked well for an audience of 500 people.
Tim reflected that the presence of skilled facilitators makes all the difference with online events - but offered us a timely reminder that even when events are wholly online, the timing of live events can be very inconvenient for Antipodean participants. He recently attended Business of Software in Boston, which he found well worth staying up late for, with well-structured sessions optimised for interaction and questions.
Also Shield GEO have run virtual retreats for their own distributed team, instead of their usual face-to-face retreats - which they really missed, and did their best to replicate elements from. Dividing their 17 regions into 3 blocs by timezone, they had fun online with trivia and so on, but also dived deeply into cultural exploration and learning from each other about each other’s locally lived experiences.
Using a blend of discussions, quizzes, and asynchronous video answers, they created a rich and fascinating learning and connecting experience within each region, and also bridged distances across the whole team by providing access to videos from the other groups.
Pilar has run webinars recently on Visible Teamwork (you can watch the recording here), and learned from participants that even when people know the theory, providing a framework and vocabulary for the interactions which support the theory is what makes all the difference.
If you enjoyed these conversations with Tim Burgess, do follow him on Twitter, and take a look at the special series on connection and disconnection in remote work that we produced in partnership with ShieldGEO nearly a year ago - when the world was a different place, but the issues were strangely evergreen.
That’s it for this quick bonus episode. Do look out for some shorter news episodes coming soon about the fast-moving current state of work, as we approach the end of this astonishing year - a year in which so many people have adopted new ways of working, and are now looking to consolidate sustainably as a conscious choice. Do let us know if we can help you and your team achieve that with our training, coaching, and facilitation services. And do keep your feedback coming, we really enjoy it - please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas, or if we can help you
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