Digital town hall microsoft

In Yammer, employees can engage in discussions and socialize before, during, and after a live event in an online community setting. Teams is an event bridge and a hub where event-related teamwork occurs, something the team uses for more of a targeted interaction.

However, it gets more challenging when a team wants to have a meeting with several thousand attendees up to 10, people. These meetings are run by a specialized production team at Microsoft, with the Microsoft Digital live events team overseeing in real time the backend video and audio streamlines.

They do this by using a third-party monitoring service that enables them to make sure these events run at the expected standards. Currently, real-time metrics are pulling information on region, bitrate, and video-buffering time—also called QoE, or quality of experience. Some employees will inevitably miss the live broadcast of the town hall for various reasons. Recording your virtual town hall also provides you with great content to repurpose for other communication efforts. You can repost snippets of the video on your internal employee communication channel to motivate employees or use quotes and excerpts of presentation as promotional material.

It's inevitable that your virtual audience will miss out on some information during the town hall. Always assign two or three note-takers for every virtual town hall and send everyone a recap of everything that was discussed. You can even include answers to the questions you were not able to answer during the town hall in the recap. One of the best parts about conducting a virtual town hall is that your metrics for success is logged and available to you in real-time.

With the use of a comprehensive audience engagement platform such as Pigeonhole Live , you can log key success metrics such as engagement levels and employee ratings of the answers to their questions.

You also have access to qualitative data such as the top concern amongst employees from the list of top voted questions and poll answers. Adding a post event survey can also be a great way to get more detailed feedback for your next virtual town hall. Virtual town halls are here to stay. Plan your virtual meeting time based on multiple time zones Virtual town hall planners often overlook the importance of setting a convenient time for everyone.

These meeting planning tools can help you sidestep the laborious task of comparing the different time zones to find the best compromise: A. World Meeting Planner Stripped down and function focused, this app can compare up to eight time zones simultaneously so you can pick the one that provides the best compromise between them.

Provide a clear agenda with event details A clear agenda can make all the difference in enticing your attendees. Invite questions ahead of the town hall Crowdsourcing questions a few days or weeks before the town hall creates anticipation for your audience to attend the town hall.

Choose the right technology partners for your event Your virtual town hall is powered by tech platforms that make live streaming and audience engagement possible. Livestream Livestream provide end-to-end live video solution for any audience size you need. Pigeonhole Live Pigeonhole Live is a live audience engagement platform that allows you to crowdsource questions from your audience live, run different types of polls, and quizzes, to keep your audience engaged during town halls while collecting valuable feedback.

Microsoft Stream If you are already on Microsoft , you can consider hosting your live event on Microsoft Stream. Test run your events: Prepare. Full-scale test-runs are crucial for two reasons: A. Surface issues with tech elements Any issues with the tech elements can surfaced ahead of time so you can work with your tech partners to troubleshoot before the actual event day.

Ensure that all stakeholders are familiar with the tech and the event process Everyone in charge of the various tech elements on the event day needs to be familiar with it and know what to do in case of a glitch. Start with ice breaker games that fit your virtual audience Short ice breaker exercises go a long way in getting everyone in an open and participative mood. Acknowledge the presence of your remote teams during the meeting A virtual town hall is not just an opportunity for you to discuss business updates and share upcoming goals.

You can do so by: A. Allowing them to use their microphone Asking questions through the microphone can be a good way to mimic the presence and interactivity of an in-person town hall. Let them chat in an interactive window Some live streaming platforms also come with the function of interactive chat windows where attendees can chat with each other during the virtual town hall.

Keep your virtual audience engaged with interactive tactics If speakers tend to lose their audience after 10 minutes during in-person presentations, can you imagine how much worse it is if their audience is not present in the room? Were they the right distance from their camera?

Would they please remember to go on and off mute at the right time? They were helped greatly by a new feature in Teams soon to be released publicly that allows more than four people to be shown on the meeting interface at once.

That automatic switching was a good thing because it made the conversation feel more natural, Schoonover says. It did, however, make it hard for the team to show alternative views, like going full-screen on someone who was talking. The solution for that was to use the pinning feature in Teams—when someone started speaking in-depth on a topic, the production team would pin their camera feed across the whole screen on a different PC and would use their production-room controller to switch to that view while they spoke.

When the speaker was wrapping up, the production team would switch back to the main PC showing the CEO and several other leaders listening. There was some teasing about the libraries and other backgrounds that the leaders were showing—a few were showing alternative backgrounds, a new feature in Teams.

It was all about bringing everyone together. There, employees watched, asked questions, and interacted with each other before, during, and after the event.

The team did all of things it normally does, including adding real-time captioning, watching for video lagging, and getting ready to make the session ready for on-demand viewing once the event was complete, says Kristyona Rosin, a webcast and transmission team lead for RUN Studios, the vendor company that supports Microsoft Production Studios.

There was some teasing about the libraries and other backgrounds that the leaders were showing—a few were showing alternative backgrounds, a new feature in Teams. It was all about bringing everyone together. There, employees watched, asked questions, and interacted with each other before, during, and after the event. The team did all of things it normally does, including adding real-time captioning, watching for video lagging, and getting ready to make the session ready for on-demand viewing once the event was complete, says Kristyona Rosin, a webcast and transmission team lead for RUN Studios, the vendor company that supports Microsoft Production Studios.

Another 13, employees watched a video-only live stream. They were having a lot of interesting and supportive conversations with each other.

And Microsoft is continuing to build in new features and experiences to help remote-working employees and customers everywhere connect through live events.

The shift to remote work over the last 18 months is one of the most significant changes in work culture since the Industrial Revolution. As reported in our recent Work Trend Index, survey data shows…. We have learned about each other, how we can work effectively from home or from anywhere, and what we can achieve when we come together with purpose and empathy.