Until a couple of years ago, before the global Covid-19 pandemic, organizing or managing virtual events was something that few people thought about and had as part of their job description.
However, although sometimes challenging, virtual events have quickly become the norm for most companies operating throughout the world that are looking for ways to bring their remote employees together. Luckily, technology has made it possible to keep people connected and also to keep a team truly engaged. As a result, organizing virtual events is a must nowadays if you want your remote employees to remain connected and interested all while making sure things are fun and exciting.
In this article, we’ll share 5 virtual event ideas to help you plan your upcoming events.
Virtual Town Hall Meetings
Town hall meetings and similar company discussions are perfect when trying to get everyone in your organization together at the same time and share important business projects, strategy decisions, and business updates, and overall progress. As more employees are working remotely, it can be challenging to get them all together in the same physical space.
Luckily, video conferences have made it significantly easier to host and run an engaging virtual town hall meeting. This type of virtual event offers the same benefits as in-person meetings, with the added bonus of allowing employees to attend it from anywhere in the world.
In addition, virtual town halls allow remote team members to share ideas, interact and communicate with each other in new ways and even record the discussions and play it back later.
Research shows that 70 percent of employees felt disengaged and unmotivated at work during moments when they felt they weren’t needed. This is why virtual town halls meetings are a productive and valuable tool to make employees feel heard by their leaders, which ultimately creates a sense of community and reinforces the organization’s mission, values, goals, and culture.
Virtual Team Building Exercises
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Lack of engagement is one of the main concerns that company managers have when working with remote teams. Although many companies report increased productivity among employees who work from home, others have witnessed a significant decline in employee engagement.
For this reason, organizing team-building activities and exercises can be an excellent solution if you’re looking to one-up your virtual events. Team building is essential when re-engaging employees and when trying to establish proper interpersonal communication between teams that are not seated next to each other. Nowadays, there are custom-built online team building events available to work on the team’s strengths, address any weaknesses and improve communication between team members.
In addition, if you wish to increase the engagement of your remote employees, your company should get a robust and integrated employee engagement tool that can help get employee feedback through automatically sent surveys. Managers can then learn about critical problems and use them to take action before these issues can have a negative impact on the company’s culture.
Virtual Volunteering
Volunteering is known for bringing people together and fostering a deep connection by allowing them to give back to their communities. With the current situation of social distancing and restrictive measures, this has become more difficult to do.
Virtual volunteering is therefore something that business owners and marketers use more often as a powerful tool for organizing a special experience and getting everyone together to help a worthy cause grow and be seen.
Virtual volunteering will allow more team members to participate and use their skills to promote camaraderie, help other companies or brands in need and make a meaningful difference. They can blend seamlessly and interact in real-time and use their experience and skills to help a charity or a small business.
So, keep an eye out for virtual volunteering as a way to improve employee engagement, participation, and accountability.
Online Debates
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If you want to create a more engaging virtual event activity, online debates are one of the most popular choices you can make. Whether it’s discussing something with coworkers that is work-related or debating about something completely different, you have the freedom of choosing a topic that you believe will be most interesting for your remote team.
To spice things up and make the debate more interesting, divide people into several teams and allow them to express their thoughts, stances, and ideas while one member can play the role of a moderator and keep score.
Virtual Concert
Only because your events have gone online, you must not forget to introduce some entertainment to the mix. Plenty of virtual event entertainment opportunities like musical performances translate perfectly to virtual events and add an element of fun and help keep your employees engaged.
With the current global situation, people are missing concerts and other different in-person experiences, so incorporating a unique performance of some sort is a lovely way to bring entertainment directly to your remote team, whether you’re having a debate or online meeting.
Final Thoughts
Due to circumstances, most companies are turning to corporate virtual events to ensure that colleagues are successfully collaborating for the good of the company.
Virtual town hall meetings, virtual volunteering, and online debates are just some online events to implement within your organization to improve satisfaction and achieve a high level of engagement among employees.
