2020 accelerated the adoption of virtual meeting and collaboration tools, as companies looked to keep their employees connected and engaged as they worked remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also become clear that remote work and learning are here to stay.
We spoke with Matt Giegerich, chief executive officer of The Inception Company, and Shaun Urban, president of The Inception Company, for expert insights on engaging virtual learners in 2021 and beyond.
Listen to this new episode, sponsored by The Inception Company, to learn more on:
- Virtual engagement lessons we learned in 2020.
- How to combat virtual meeting fatigue in an increasingly digital workplace.
- Tips for successful virtual meeting and training facilitation.
Listen Now:
Additional Resources:
- The Business of Learning, Special Episode: Connecting Remote Teams With Virtual Meetings
- Training Industry Magazine: Virtual Learning
- Training in the Time of COVID: How Learning and Development is Responding
- Setting Up Your Facilitators for Virtual Success
The transcript for this episode follows:
Speaker 1:
Welcome to The Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo:
Hello, and welcome to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, an associate editor at Training Industry.
Taryn DeLong:
And I’m Taryn Oesch Delong, managing editor. This episode of The Business of Learning is sponsored by the Inception Company.
Ad:
The Inception Company offers an integrated and interconnected ecosystem of products, technologies and services. Our newest innovation, Pando, redefines virtual engagement by reinforcing the power of human connection to the instructors, the content and each other. Pando integrates a full studio production with remote participants displayed on a 40-foot video wall, in-person moderator or moderators and seamless onboarding support. Learners participate in a highly interactive experience that delivers the impact of an in-person meeting. For more information, visit pandomeetings.com or inceptioncompany.com.
Sarah Gallo:
2020 has accelerated the adoption of virtual meeting and collaboration tools as companies look to keep their employees connected and engaged as they worked remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also become clear that remote work and learning are both here to stay. We spoke with the Inception Company about a year ago about this very topic, right at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but a year later, we’re speaking with them again to revisit. Today, we’re speaking with Matt Giegerich, chief executive officer of the Inception Company, and Shaun Urban, president of the Inception Company, about virtual engagement. Shaun, Matt, welcome.
Matt Giegerich:
Thank you so much. Nice to be here.
Shaun Urban:
Yeah, it’s great to be here with you all. It’s hard to believe it’s been over a year since we engaged the last time and my, how our world has changed and become virtual.
Taryn DeLong:
That’s for sure [the] understatement of the century, I think. With that in mind, Sean, do you want to kick us off with how you thought 2020 really transformed virtual meetings and virtual training in particular?
Shaun Urban:
Sure, I’d be happy to. I think first and foremost, 2020 really required companies to pivot, and companies pivoted from largely [relying] on in-person events and meetings to pivot [to virtual delivery]. We saw some of our clients who pivoted very quickly and reaped a lot of benefits. We also saw clients who experimented a bit [and] were innovative in their approaches. Certainly we saw [some] clients fail, but most importantly, learn from those failures and get better and stronger at delivering virtual training meetings and events. We also saw our clients really reorient and retrain their employees and organizations on how to operate and work successfully in a virtual environment. It also really forced us [as] suppliers and innovators in the virtual meeting and event space to adapt; to innovate; to fail and to learn from our failures. One of the ways [we have meet the demand for virtual training and meetings] is with our premiere virtual event platform called Pando, [which is] studio-based, and we have eight to 10 technicians and engineers that work out of our control room in our studio producing these virtual events for meetings that really matter. In light of COVID-19 and the necessity to socially distance our crew and limit the number of people at our studio for these events, we had to invest in technology that would allow our crew, technicians and engineers to produce these events virtually themselves from the comfort of their homes. Even suppliers like the Inception Company were required to adapt. We’ve certainly seen that 2020 brought about competition in the virtual event and learning space and that competition was born opportunistically, but it also was born out of survival for some organizations.
Matt Giegerich:
If I could just pile on to that, I’m thinking less about the companies and how they have changed and adapted but more how individuals, how the workers, how all of us, even those of us on the call right now, had to change [and adapt during COVID-19]. In truth now, this many months into the pandemic, we’ve all become this incredible, well trained, if not perfectly trained, band of independent remote work world warriors. We’ve learned skills and had to adapt in ways we wouldn’t have imagined two years ago. The technology itself has become fairly ubiquitous and people’s facility with technology has jumped enormously in the past 12 months. If you went back two years ago and asked 100 people to join a simple web conference or a video conference, at least half of them never would have been able to connect. Now, virtually everybody can connect and can even troubleshoot their own tech. [When I think about how training has transformed since 2020], certainly companies had to quickly pivot, as Shaun said, to train employees on how to deal with this new work world, being at home alone possibly [or] being at home with family or children [and learning] how to get things done without being physically connected on a day-to-day work level with their colleagues. That was an enormous amount of training that people had to go through both directed by the company and just self-taught learning by experiment and as people went [throughout their day] Now, of course, the what-comes-next training is [about] how to blend all of this new knowledge and skills into the work world that’s certainly not going back 100% to the way it used to be. It’s going to be a new blended world of remote workers and live, on-location workers [coupled with] events that are purely virtual and events that are a hybrid of on-location and virtual [participants]. Those are all new skills. We’ve all learned real-time in the past 12 months, and we can all take those skills forward into the new kind of bold world of work that’s going to emerge.
Sarah Gallo:
Those are some great points, Matt. I definitely resonate with the idea of transforming into a remote work warrior. I think many of us may have not had the skills to be successful working from home in the beginning of the pandemic but have truly adopted, so it’s great to see. Well, on the other hand of that, obviously we didn’t become masters at remote work or virtual engagement overnight. What kind of virtual engagement lessons did we learn during the coronavirus pandemic? Shaun, let’s start with you.
Shaun Urban:
Well, I think some of the lessons that we learned during the pandemic were really building upon lessons that we’ve learned for quite some time. One of those is that content is still king and it’s really important that we’re adapting content based on the virtual platform that has been selected for the event or training session that you’re holding. It’s really, really important to select that right virtual platform for the task at hand. We’ve also talked about the importance of managing [what has] become to be known as Zoom fatigue to keep remote attendees’ minds sharp [and to keep] them emotionally healthy and ensure that they’re retaining the information that we’re training them on or that we’re delivering to them. We also have learned that sometimes there’s not a one-size-fits-all virtual platform for a particular need, and that there’s a need to combine and integrate virtual platforms to fully meet the objectives and the needs of the event or the training. We’ve known for a while that multi-modality within platforms is really, really important to keep people engaged in virtual trainings and sessions, and that became super important as we’ve kind of trudged our way through the coronavirus pandemic. But I think maybe one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned working and being trained and learning virtually for so long now during the pandemic is that platforms that allow human-to-human connection and the connection of humans to humanity are what remote attendees are really desiring, and what they’re missing from being together in person as they were so frequently.
Matt Giegerich:
Yeah, boy, that’s right on Shaun. The human connection piece is just exactly on point. If I could add a couple of thoughts here, I think one of the biggest lessons we learned about the world and the way the world can work using virtual technologies and platforms is that, in fact, it can work and that companies have implemented, [or soon will be implementing], their what-comes-after-coronavirus plans. I think most [companies] are going to be putting in place plans that acknowledge that this grand experiment that was foisted upon the universe has proved a certain theory that is now irrefutable: that a large majority, if not all, of the workforce can in fact do what they do remotely. That’s going to change everything from expectations of employment and location to real estate buildings, leases, et cetera. Those are lessons that are going to change the way the world looks going forward. We also learned that virtual work, as a few of us were discussing earlier, can be quite all consuming and even draining. Shaun mentioned Zoom fatigue, which is a real thing. It doesn’t have to be. I think another point Shaun made is that selecting the right platform [and] the right technology for the task, matching tech to task is really important. Because not every meeting needs a video camera. Not every meeting needs content being shared. Some meetings can be done by phone. Some meetings can be done by a simple web conference and a screen share. Some meetings need to be a full-on production that engages not just the mind and the eyeballs, but the heart and the emotion of the human at the other end [of the screen] as well. That continuum is something that’s going to have to be actively thought through and managed now by companies when they think about, well, how do we apply these learnings of the virtual world and all these technologies into the way we go forward?
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, thanks for breaking that down for us. It seems like COVID has definitely been a crash course in pretty much all things virtual. Well, looking ahead, how do you think that these lessons will shape the future of virtual meetings and training?
Shaun Urban:
Well, I can start. I think, number one, since it’s been a year or so of trial and error, experimentation [and] learning on various virtual platforms, ultimately clients will be more informed and they will be more discerning in the virtual platforms that they select. Remote attendees are going to be more savvy and effective in their participation in virtual events and virtual training sessions. I do think content agencies are going to be more knowledgeable in how they create content for virtual events. And I do believe, although some clients are taking longer to learn this lesson than others, and certainly perhaps larger clients in which technologies are forced upon the entire organization, that a one-size-fits-all approach to virtual events and virtual technology platforms will no longer work …. There certainly is going to be a desire and a need for a virtual element or a component to in-person events once we get back to them in the foreseeable future. This hybrid event that the marketplace is talking about, it’s not just hyperbole. It’s here to stay. Then, the last thought I have is [that] data security and management and cybersecurity is going to continue to grow in importance. I do think that you will see virtual technology providers really assuring their clients that they have these security measures in place and that their data is protected along the way.
Matt Giegerich:
Those are all great points, Shaun. I really don’t have much I can add other than suggesting that companies are still very much fumbling through this even though we’re a year into this pandemic and all the experimentation and learning that we’ve had. We’re still trying to solve problems with technology when it might not be a technology challenge [that needs solving]. Things like Zoom social hours and trivia games attempting to fill in for human contact [may not work]. I think we’re going to recognize as we go forward that there are certain things that technology platforms and virtual events, and even hybrid events, really are perfect for and getting better and better for. I’ll certainly highlight our own platform Pando in saying that. But there are other [instances when] it really falls short. While you can hold a virtual cocktail hour because we’re not allowed to connect [in person] because of the pandemic, a year from now a virtual cocktail hour is going to seem like a hollow attempt at filling a yearning for actual human connection. We should be very discerning about how we as workers and employees and how we as leaders of businesses think about that line and when we should do things live, must do things live, and in other cases, where we don’t need to be live and what the balances are that we have to strike there.
Taryn DeLong:
It seems like there’s a lot of nuance there, and everyone was picking it up as they went last year. With that in mind, what are some of the mistakes that you saw organizations making last year when they were switching meetings and training programs to the virtual space?
Matt Giegerich:
I’ll just jump in and say that I think one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve seen, and we attempt to correct it all the time in the work we do with our clients, is thinking of a virtual meeting or a virtual event as a didactic broadcast. That there’s a message that has to be conveyed, there’s a slide deck that has to be gone through, there’s a presenter that has to present, and that everybody else is there as a drone or a sponge there to just soak in the information, and that’s the extent to which they’ve thought it through. For all of us who sat behind our camera and screen now for hours and days and weeks and even months at a time, I think we can all recognize when what we are supposed to be engaging with feels like it’s just content being pushed out through my screen, it becomes the opposite [of what it should be]. It becomes less engaging. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes, is thinking of [virtual meetings] as a one-way correspondence when, if it’s not two-way, you’re truly not engaging on the other end. On the other hand, as I suggested earlier, if you go so far as to think that somehow the technology is going to replace actual human contact and through kind of failed attempts at creating the social games and the cocktail hours and things like that, as if that’s going to fill that void, that’s certainly a mistake too, and you have to be discerning about which technology pick for which event and what content you push into that event, and then ultimately, how you choose to engage each other through those events. It’s very different, depending on what kind of meeting or objective you’ve got.
Shaun Urban:
Matt, just to build on some of those common mistakes around the one-way pushing of content, more in a broadcast format, it’s also trying to incorporate too much content and curriculum in individual virtual training sessions that leads to exhaustion and fatigue and distraction for the remote learner. We oftentimes can see that if we are using platforms that have the ability to calculate remote attendee engagement scores and measures, and if we’re looking at those measured engagement measures and scores closely, we should be using them to really reorient and evolve the next virtual training session agenda and to revise our content in that next virtual instructor-led training session that eliminates some of this content fatigue and Zoom fatigue and technology fatigue, et cetera. Lastly, I’ll just add, and I’ve mentioned this really earlier in our discussion, some of the additional mistakes that we saw clients make is just simply pivoting too late from in-person to virtual events. While clients did a lot of due diligence and spent a lot of time in the assessment and evaluation phase of various virtual platforms, sometimes that effort just took way too long and they found themselves losing momentum and critical staff development needs and opportunities that pass them by in 2020.
Matt Giegerich:
Well said.
Taryn DeLong:
Shaun, you mentioned engagement and I think we’ve all been unengaged participants in virtual events, and we’ve all experienced other people’s disengagement as well. What tips do you have for keeping people engaged when it comes to these virtual training events?
Shaun Urban:
Well, I think first and foremost [that] the leaders, presenters, moderators and trainers of these virtual events have to be dynamic communicators. They certainly have to be well-trained and comfortable with the virtual platform that is being utilized. Matt mentioned this earlier, [but it’s also about] ensuring that [you’re using the right platform] for the right training sessions and events. [Engagement] really, really matters [when] there’s a high production value associated with that meeting or event … [it] becomes critically, critically important. It’s also important for organizations and trainers to leverage platforms whereby the trainer or the moderator can read body language mannerisms of remote attendees, and literally pull distracted learners back into the session. I think we’ve known this for a while, but incorporating a bit of fun into sessions using various techniques and tools that are at our disposal like gamification or building personal moments or entertaining moments into virtual events [and training sessions] becomes really, really important [for engagement]. When you think about leveraging virtual platforms like Pando, that are studio-based, really taking advantage of the unique set designs and staging and the multiple camera angles and shots and the regular switching of the program feed that a platform has to offer … will keep the virtual session entertaining and people really leaning in to their laptop, desktop or iPad. These are just a few tips that really can keep distracted learners focused and engaged throughout an entire session.
Matt Giegerich:
I can build on that. I think if we really ponder how we interact with screens in our lives outside the working world, we can probably all admit that we’re looking to be entertained. It doesn’t always have to be fun or funny. Sometimes it’s serious and part tugging, but we look at a screen and pay attention to it because it’s captured not just our eyes and our minds necessarily, but because it’s tugged at our emotions somehow, and as Shaun mentioned, things like high production value counts, social moments count, thinking of the presenters as not just a deliverer of content but actually a showman or a show woman on a stage, and using every trick of the trade to get people leaned in, pulled in, sucked in and believing that they’re watching this and participating in this, not because they have to but because they want to. That is an important learning going forward and it certainly applies to how we approach work that we do with our studios and our Pando platform and others.
Taryn DeLong:
Those are some great tips. I think that’s definitely easy to become distracted during virtual meetings, mostly because right now, a lot of us feel like there’s so many of them. What tips do you have for reducing this kind of virtual meeting fatigue that many people are seeing in today’s increasingly digital business environment?
Matt Giegerich:
This is Matt. I’ll jump in. I think the number one thing is to recognize that not all meetings and meeting objectives are the same. There’s a big difference in a team status update meeting versus a senior-level, important strategic planning meeting, and that’s different from a training meeting, which is still different from a national sales force motivational meeting. Picking the right tech for the right task is critical because if we’re all stuck to our screens all day, every day, it can become quite draining. But if this meeting can be done with a phone call, then I can walk around the house while I’m on that phone call and keep my body active and my brain engaged in the conversation without having to sit still in one place on a camera. I think making those choices [and] being very careful about what solution you’re choosing for what meeting is probably the most important [piece of advice]. Secondly, I think Shaun mentioned earlier, that you really have to be thoughtful about time. Blocking an hour of time for each meeting on the calendar looks pretty and tidy and convenient when you look at your Outlook calendar, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect how important each of those discussions might be in the context of your day. Sometimes a five-minute conversation is all you need. Sometimes you do need three hours, but it’s really, really helpful to build in a couple of breaks so that people can stand up, walk around, use the facilities, get something to eat or drink, shake their Etch-a-Sketch if you will. Then lastly, just to echo the point one last time, if you’re leading an important meeting, a training session, certainly you’ve got to really keep things moving, keep them entertaining, keep people pulled in, let other people speak, let the people know who are remote believe real-time that they can be pulled into the conversation at any moment so they better stay on their toes and focused on what’s happening. There’s a lot of things you can do to reduce fatigue. I think we’ve all learned quite a bit over the last 12 months.
Shaun Urban:
Those are great, great points, Matt. Really, the only thing I have to add is, and this is really more for content agencies … but content providers need to really build agendas and their content with the virtual learning environment [and] experience that they desire to achieve and the platform that has been selected in mind. We can’t take the same approach to building content in a virtual world as we do for in-person meetings.
Taryn DeLong:
Thanks. Shaun, I wanted to go back to something you mentioned earlier about how important it was that the facilitators, the presenters, really understand how to present, virtually understand the platform, and understand the difference between presenting in person and presenting online. What skills do people, leaders or presenters, need to become successful virtual facilitators and what steps can learning and development take to help them develop those skills?
Shaun Urban:
Well, I think foundationally, virtual presenters, moderators, and trainers have to have great interpersonal communication and presentation skills. They have to have the ability to moderate and facilitate dialogue and engagement among and across participants. They should be knowledgeable and fluent of all the engagement tools and features of the platform that they’re using. They have to use these tools in a purposeful and diverse way throughout the course of the entire virtual event. And there’s a nuanced skill that has to be really trained on and leveraged. That’s the ability to pull people back into a learning session or a conversation when they can see and tell that they’ve lost focus and they have to do that in a non-threatening or a non-intimidating way. Really, [virtual facilitators] have to have a discipline and a sophistication to utilize all the engagement measures and scores, as I’ve mentioned in the past, to really evaluate and inform the way that they design and that they facilitate and moderate future meetings and training sessions that they hold.
Matt Giegerich:
Every one of those are perfect points, Shaun. I’ll just build on it more broadly by saying that, to really be a great virtual facilitator, you’ve got to be, and especially coming out of the learnings of the pandemic, you’ve got to be extraordinarily human. Empathy, situation sensing and humor are all really, really important. What we’ve learned through this grand experiment over the last 12 months is a lot about people’s individual lives, their individual circumstance, the setting of their home office, their kids, their pets, their doorbell chiming, their challenges. If you’re going to be successful in connecting with remote attendees, in any kind of a meeting, and certainly in a training meeting, you’ve got to really demonstrate that you understand what’s happening on the other end of that camera. The more you do that, the more people get pulled in and feel connected, not just via technology, but connected as human beings, which is a point Shaun made earlier in one of the other questions we addressed.
Taryn DeLong:
That’s such a great point. I think we’ve all seen really into our coworkers’ lives this year and last year for better or worse, and hopefully for better. [That’s] a great point to keep in mind for virtual facilitation as well. All right, to wrap things up today, what do you see happening this year in the virtual events space, virtual training, virtual meetings? What should people look out for this year? What trends do you predict happening?
Matt Giegerich:
I’ll take that one. I think the most obvious answer is the notion of hybrid meetings. That as we emerge out of the pandemic and into a next normal phase [of life], there’s going to be a blend of both live in-person and virtual [meetings]. That’s clearly the path forward and probably will remain the path forward for possibly forever. I also think there’s going to be changes in the way people think about remote engagements. We talked a lot about high production value, thinking about it not just as a meeting, but as something that is pulling people in by nature of its content, by the dynamism of the presenters, the empathy they display, all those kinds of things. I also think there’s going to be evolution in technology and the way people think about where they are and what they’re looking at while they’re in remote meetings.
Matt Giegerich:
Most of us have been somewhat reduced to think about a virtual event as something that occurs on a 12-inch laptop screen. Possibly, if you’re real advanced, you’ll have it plugged into a second screen that’s a little larger sitting alongside it. But the truth is sometimes it’s better to see things life-size on larger screens [with] the ability to stand up in front of a screen and interact with somebody who appears life-size or larger, changing the dynamic [of the engagement]. Now, I’m not just sitting here looking at my camera. I might be walking around and interacting with other things while I’m in a meeting. [Looking at] physical space and the room you’re in, and we’ve all seen different backgrounds, I think there’s going to be continued advancement of the technology that creates the environment that we want to present and how that is connecting with the people on the other end of that camera. I think the innovation is just going to continue: blending platforms together, creating the opportunities to do new things, introducing 3D animations, virtual reality into virtual meetings. I think it’s just going to keep going and going and going.
Matt Giegerich:
I couldn’t have said it better myself, Mr. Giegerich. You’re a good man.
Sarah Gallo:
Perfect. Well, all right. That concludes this episode of The Business of Learning. Matt and Shaun, thank you both for joining us today.
Shaun Urban:
Thank you so much.
Matt Giegerich:
Thank you so much for including us. We appreciate it.
Taryn DeLong:
To learn more about this topic and to view this episode’s highlights and animation, check out the show notes at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.
Sarah Gallo:
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to rate and view us on your favorite podcast app.
Taryn DeLong:
Until next time.
Speaker 1:
If you have feedback about this episode or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com or use the Contact Us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to The Training Industry podcast.
