The BEST Moves
Mix the Room and the Screen
A holiday party where the remote half plays instead of watching. Put the people at home on the same teams as the people in the room, and give every team a way to hear them.
3 min read The move is free From 10 Business Scenarios
How to run it
You can do all of this yourself, on Monday, without calling anybody.
Put your remote people on in-room teams, not on a team of their own.
Build each team from the room first, then add two or three remote players to it. A team of five at the table plus a few on the screen is a team. A separate "Zoom team" is an audience.
Give every table its own screen for its remote teammates.
One big screen on the wall lets remote people see the party. A laptop or tablet at each table lets them talk to their own team, hear the debate and get a word in before the answer locks.
Pick an activity everyone plays from their own phone.
When every player answers on their own device, the person at home has the same buttons as the person in the room. A game show is the easiest format to run this way; a give-back build works too when the challenges that earn the parts are played in an app.
Test the audio the day before, from someone’s home.
Have one remote player join from home, on home internet, and talk to a table in the room. If they cannot hear the room, or the room cannot hear them, fix it then. On the day there is no time.
Watch out: Do not let the remote players become their own team because it is easier to set up. No team should be made only of people on Zoom.
Why it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
The hard part of a hybrid event is not the technology. It is making both groups feel part of the same event. When the remote people play as their own team, they spend the party watching other people have fun through a camera. When they are spread across the room’s teams, every table needs their answers to win, so the room keeps turning to the screen. The game does the including for you.
“Engaging the remote audience is fairly easy for a game show… The key to successfully delivering these types of events, is having worked out the technology end beforehand. If people can’t hear each other, if the bandwidth isn’t strong enough, if the audio and video is breaking up, it may be a questionable experience.”
Roy Charette, Best Corporate Events, in 10 Business Scenarios Where Team Building Leads to Success (p. 33)
Five in the room, two or three on the screen
The mixed teams we run put perhaps five people in person together with two or three remote teammates in other cities, all working on the same challenge.
10 Business Scenarios (p. 33)
Both halves have to feel it
The biggest challenge in producing a hybrid event is making both sets of participants, those in the room and those online, feel actively engaged. In our hybrid builds, each in-person team gets its own tablet to see and talk with its remote teammates, who answer in the app on their phones.
Four Essential Keys to Hybrid Team Building (pp. 2, 6)
Where this move came from
Or take the whole book.
10 Business Scenarios Where Team Building Leads to Success
Ten common business situations, the programs that fit each, and Roy’s notes throughout.
Send me the eBook
No event in mind yet? Take the reading. PDF straight to your inbox, and a real person follows up — the question at the bottom tells us when that is actually useful.
Activities that do this for you
If you would rather not run it yourself, these are built around the same job.
