How to Run a Virtual Summit

By Anne-Marie Matos, People Operations Manager

Since the beginning, CareMessage has hosted annual in-person summits (aka retreats) for our employees. Being an all remote company, these events have been a unique opportunity for our team to connect with each other, our company’s goals, and our overall mission. Not to mention, it’s a chance to have a lot of fun together as a team. Last year, for example, our team members flew in from around the world to attend a three day Summit in Anaheim, California. It was an event full of team presentations, group activities, and a trip to Disneyland!

At the beginning of this year, we started to brainstorm for our annual summit, yet our plans came to a screeching halt in light of the novel Coronavirus. After addressing the immediate needs of our customers through CM Light and launching numerous wellness initiatives to meet the needs of our employees; we went back to the drawing board for our summit preparations.

Even though we couldn’t come together for an in-person event this year, we still wanted to engage our team and give them a bright spot on their calendars.

We landed on the idea of hosting a Virtual Summit: A two part, company event that would be hosted entirely over Zoom. Two weeks ago we completed part one of the event. In short, it ended up being one of our best events to date. We had 100% attendance and the team had such positive feedback to share after the event. Below is a closer look at what we did to prepare for our virtual event.

Preparation

First things first, preparing for our virtual summit looked like embracing all of our company values with a big emphasis on empathy, innovation, and collaboration.

Innovation- This was new territory for us, so we had to think outside of the box. To come up with the framework, we combined our weekly All Hands meeting format with some elements that we enjoyed from past summits in order to come up with the right kind of programming for this event.

Empathy- We were also aware that this event was taking place during unprecedented times. All of our employees were navigating a new normal with the impacts of COVID-19 and Shelter In Place orders. Not to mention, some of our employees were now homeschool teachers on top of their day to day roles. With all of that in mind we did our best to communicate expectations up front- inviting our team to join at their own comfort level. Whether that looked like turning off their cameras at certain times, or opting out of a challenge here and there. We wanted to make sure they felt comfortable. We even created challenges that the kiddos could join in on, such as a dance break and a cook-off challenge.

Collaboration- At the end of the day, this event was only going to be a success if everyone participated. So we collaborated with different team members in order to make the event well rounded and diverse.

Next up, we had to put our project management skills to the test.

Since this event was now all remote- we needed to ensure the behind the scenes of the event were organized and well thought through. So we created a Summit Project Tracker with a detailed checklist that included everything we needed to complete.

After that, we created our own Run Sheet for the day of the event to help budget our time. We chose to include logistical items such as how to navigate transitions, screen shares, slides, and more. This helped us work as a team behind the scenes to ensure the summit ran smoothly for everyone attending over Zoom.

Lastly, when preparing for this online event we tried to keep it simple!

We kept reminding ourselves that this was our first time trying this, so it wasn’t going to be perfect. The goal was to do our best, and create a virtual space for the team to connect with one another and have some fun.

We kept the agenda light, with a focus on cross-departmental interaction through challenges, icebreakers, and Zoom breakouts. Our thought process was that we could learn from part one of the event, and then be able to dive a little deeper in part two of the event, which is tentatively set to happen in Q4 of this year.

We even created a wiki page on Confluence ahead of time that included detailed information on what to expect throughout the event, and shared it with our team a couple weeks before the virtual summit. That way folks could decide for themselves prior to logging on, how they’d like to participate.

To top things off, we chose to make our event a tropical theme.

Reason being, our team is spread across multiple states, and even countries. So picking a universal theme, helped us feel like we were in one virtual location together. The team really embraced the theme by wearing tropical attire and even sported some very creative backgrounds, too.

Programming

As we mentioned earlier on, we decided to make our virtual summit a two part event. So when it came to creating the programming, we decided to keep the first part, predominantly social. Our plan is to structure the second part of the event more around employee learning and development opportunities, the “meat and potatoes” if you will.

With that said, here is a closer look at part one of our virtual summit.

Summit Session

Mission and Vision — by our Co-founders

• This was the only presentation we had at the event. It was led by our co-founders, Cecilia Corral and Vineet Singal. In the presentation they announced our refreshed mission and vision for the company including a revised Mission Statement, Vision Statement, and Descriptive Statement.

Challenges

Memory Challenge

• This challenge took place directly after the Mission and Vision Presentation.
• We broke the team out into random groups of four and asked the group to practice memorizing the new CareMessage Statements in a creative way.
• After the team was done memorizing the statements, we came back together as one big group and had folks volunteer to share the statements. It was so fun to see how creative the team chose to memorize and recite the statements- from movie trailers, to short skits, to hand drawn diagrams. Everyone had a fun time learning and reciting our renewed mission and vision.

CM Cook-off Challenge

• In this challenge we invited the team to move into their kitchen and make a snack with their cameras on (or off if they were more comfortable). They had 15 minutes total to create, plate, and snap a photo of their snack in order to be entered into a chance to win “best dish”. We even had a foodie panel ready to vote for the best snack. To make the challenge even more interactive, we welcomed employee’s kiddos and significant others to play along.

Thank you Sign Challenge

• We are so thankful for all of the healthcare professionals working so hard on the front lines right now, including some of our very own customers.
• So we dedicated some time to break out in random groups of 4 to work together to virtually create Thank You Signs.
• The team had 20 minutes to decide what their sign would say, create their sign, and then snap a picture holding their sign.

Icebreakers

Roll Call

• Remember when you used to do a roll call at the beginning of class back in grade school? Well we created a fun version of just that- and used at is an icebreaker as a way to kick off our event.
• In 30 seconds we asked everyone in the company to say hello, say their name, where they were joining from, and their favorite tropical place. (as a fun way to tie in our tropical theme) .

Dance Break

• We had a team member (who is trained in Salsa) teach us a few moves over Zoom and then we practiced dancing as a team for a fun 10 minute break. It was a great work out, and some of our employees had their entire family dancing along.

Summit Shout Outs

• To wrap things up, we took a few minutes to thank everyone for making the event such a success, including a few shout outs to folks that went above and beyond.

Tools

To ensure the virtual summit was interactive, we decided to use Slack all throughout the event as a way to engage our employees.

We used the #general channel as a space for everyone to share photos and comments throughout the presentations and challenges. It was fun to be able to scroll back after the Summit to relive the event.

Here’s a look at the winner of our CM Cook-Off. Ben Ferry, our Senior Business Operations Manager, who brought home the Big “W”, with this delicious breakfast captured here.

We also would not have been able to achieve this event without Zoom. Being an all remote team, we are pretty comfortable utilizing Zoom for all company meetings, but the Gallery View visibility and Zoom Breakout function really took our event to the next level.

Post Summit Retrospective

Like I said in the beginning, the part one of our virtual summit was a huge success, and we would 100% recommend doing the same with your team.

A week after our summit, our People Operations team sent out a survey to our managers for a chance to learn what went well, what did not work well, and ask for suggestions as we plan part two of this event. All in all- the responses were very positive. If we could summarize our learnings it would be this:

1. The team really enjoyed the virtual experience and programming. It was a nice balance of presentations, challenges, icebreakers, and cross departmental interaction.
2. A three hour time slot seemed to be the perfect amount of time for the event. We might suggest adding a second break into the agenda.
3. Folks really appreciated the flexibility to join at their own comfort level, too. Whether that looked like turning their camera off at times or opting out of a challenge here and there. It really helped to take the pressure off of folks while navigating through these unprecedented times.

We can’t wait to share with you how part two of the virtual summit plays out.

In the meantime we hope you feel inspired to plan and run your own virtual event. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need a little help.