National University Podcast Series
National University Deans, Faculty, and Leadership discuss a wide range of topics with a focus on the higher education community. Tune in to hear from our experts, alumni, students, and faculty. Current programs include: Center for the Advancement of Virtual Organizations (CAVO), Virtual Education Support Center (VESC) and Whole Person Center (WPC), formerly Virtual Center for Health and Wellness (VC4HW).
National University Podcast Series
CAVO Ep. 93: Strategies for Boosting Attendance in Hybrid Meetings
Whether you're managing a remote team or balancing in-person and virtual attendees, listen to John Chen, author of Engaging Virtual Meetings and 50 Digital Team Building Games and Dr. Jeff Belsky, Associate Professor in the College of Business, Engineering, and Technology at National University, and learn how to create compelling meeting experiences that bring everyone to the table, no matter where they are located.
Welcome to the Center of Advancement of Virtual Organization Podcast Strategies for Boosting Attendance and Hybrid Meetings. I'm Dr. Jeff Belski at National University, and today I'm joined by John Chen, author of Engaging Virtual Meetings. John has been virtually meeting for over 37 years and can juggle 24 screens of information at a time. He has planned the only 100% live virtual conference in the training industry for 1,200 people and produced an eight-language virtual webinar. He invented, quote unquote, hybrid in a box, reducing the hybrid setup time from eight hours to one hour and is recognized thought leader of engaging virtual meetings. Our discussion today will focus on actionable tactics and insights to drive engagement and attendance in hybrid meetings, blending the best of virtual and in-person interactions. Welcome, John. I appreciate you taking the time to be here for this conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. Before we jump in, John, can you share a little bit by yourself to get us started? And then I'll go through a couple questions.
SPEAKER_01:All right, Jeff. Well, I was a young child born in Stockton, California. Had an illustrious career, went to UC Santa Barbara Go Gauchos, and then ended up here working at Microsoft where I shipped 10 products, got two US patents, and helped ship a product that sold over 250 million client licenses before I started working on my own and came out here. Uh, really worked on team building and over the pandemic led a journey into virtual and a hybrid meeting. So my life in two minutes.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic, John. Well, I tell you, we're we're gonna be talking about a topic today that, you know, I always say before the pandemic, it was rocking and rolling. And when a pandemic hit, it rocked and rolled, and it just went as quickly as could be. And uh, and boy, we are we are definitely in a uh in an environment that uh this type of information is is a necessity for any business. So thank you very much again, John, for being uh being with us. So I'm gonna jump into some questions here and see where it goes. And uh first question I have for you, John, is what are the key challenges organizations face in balancing virtual and in-person attendance in hybrid meetings?
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for that, Jeff. I think you know, the first I want to share the two biggest challenges before we talk about balancing the two. And the two biggest challenges that I hear from people who plan hybrid meetings is that they are too complicated and they cost too much. Jeff, have you heard the same feedback?
SPEAKER_00:Oh my goodness, all the time, John. All the time.
SPEAKER_01:So one of the parts around the technology is or is around it being too complicated. Uh, number one, there are lots of different ways to go wrong. And there are some relatively easy ways to make it much more engaging, and they don't have to be complicated, but the kind of key is like it's new. You know, in person, it took us a couple hundred years to figure out how to do those meetings great. In virtual, well, we had about three or four meeters to get it right. And hybrid is also a new piece, so I think you really have to look at it as something that's slightly new and change some of the pieces with it. Uh, going into the other point here that it costs too much is that uh often now AV prices, such as if you were in a hotel in Met, uh, they are highly elevated, sometimes reaching you know, five and six and sometimes seven digits for people. And what we discovered is that a lot of the things that you want to do can be off the shelf. So if you get the right technology, it can be very cost effective and sometimes not cost anything else at all. So, Jeff, the last point I have, you know, and balancing virtual and in-person attendance. What I'm excited about hybrid is that it allows you to capture the both of the best worlds, right? So hybrid allows you to capture the energy of an in-person audience as well as the reach to a virtual audience. And often we have seen 50 to 100% increased attendance by adding the hybrid option to a meeting. So, in one way, you don't have to balance virtual and in-person. I mean, the only challenges for in-person is the limitations to the room. And the only limitations to virtual is the size of the account that you bought to allow people in. And if you stream to things like YouTube, technically you actually have no uh limit to the number of people that you have. So that's how I would balance those two.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, great, great answer there, John. And you know, to tag along with that, uh what you said there, and to just talk about engagement a little bit, because you, you know, one of the things that people always, you know, say, or they sometimes say is, you know, when you got virtual meetings or hybrid meetings, you know, it's always better to be in person. Um, that engagement level, and you've brought that up. Um, talk a little bit about that. Uh, I how do you see the engagement level with you know virtual meetings and hybrid meetings?
SPEAKER_01:Well, let me just ask you a question, Jeff. Have you ever attended a hybrid meeting and felt like a second-class citizen?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I I I think everybody maybe some have sometime has. Um, but I don't know. For me, John, it's kind of tough because I'm I'm I'm virtual and hybrid all the time. So it's kind of a hard question for me because I love it. Um, you know, and and uh I I don't know, but um sometimes I hear that you know the engagement level is sometimes it's like, wow, I'd rather be in person. I'd rather be, you know, uh talk to me about that engagement. What have you seen in some of your meetings? I mean, you've got more experience than of course I do and many and many other people, but what do you see as far as that engagement?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and some programs that I've and some of my friends have attended, we have felt like second-class citizens, which is you log into the virtual, but there's no way for you to be seen, there's no way for you to talk, and sometimes even no way to even chat. So you end up becoming a passive observer with that. So, in terms of engagement, uh, we have a simple saying, and that Jeff is if you want engagement, engage. You know, have a plan to engage every attendee, whether they're attending in person or virtual. And there's so many different ways now with all the technology to do that. We can do, of course, the the simple things, which is if you have the capability to put uh a virtual attendee on screen and actually have their mic work so they can actually talk. We have setups now where a virtual attendee anywhere in the world can come and speak to any one of our speakers and have a conversation. Of course, they find that directly engaging, it is very hard to be multitasking and disengaged when you're on the main stage talking to a keynote speaker with possibly hundreds of viewers. So that's one key piece. And the second is uh the around the technology. You in many of our virtual programs, the chat often gives you a better experience than sometimes the in-person because it's the one place everywhere can talk. In addition to that, we're using tools like we actually use a tool called Stream Alive, and it allows the virtual people just to chat to answer a question, and it allows the in-person people to scan a QR code and get on a phone and also answer, and so you can get hundreds of people to engage uh with a single program all at the same time by using technology.
SPEAKER_00:That's fantastic, and and I think that's really the the key point there is you you know you mentioned there's a lot of technology out there that allows you to bring what we've seen in the past you know, three, four years of virtual meetings and so bring that to a level where people are engaged and they feel a part of the process and and feel a part of uh of the actual meeting. Um what about cameras? Talk to me, uh talk to me uh a little bit about you, you know, um seeing seeing people on the screen and turning on the camera and and uh that type of engagement. What have you seen with that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, thanks, Jeff. You know, I want to add one piece before that, which is this that sometimes, especially on virtual programs, the audio is more important than the video. Like this podcast, right? We don't have cameras on, but we can still engage an attendee when you have the audio. But Jeff, it up that the well okay, I'm making fun. But if my audio starts getting garbled, then uh all the attendees cannot hear anything with it. So in many of these programs, we first focused on the audio, and that's one making sure that the speaker has clear audio in the event that we have virtual attendees, that the virtual attendees can be heard clearly, uh, and that if we have somebody in the audience speak, we make sure that they get a microphone or we have a way to hear them correctly inside the room. So that's the first part. Now, in video, we are running four camera setups now on a regular basis, and here's the reason why. You know, most people watching a program are used to watching television or movies, and so they're used to things like camera angle cuts or changes. If you go to watch a recent movie and count, just count to yourself what before the next cut comes 1001, 1002, 1001, 1001, 1002, 1003. You'll find that like uh modern movies and television is cutting every three seconds. So when you have multiple cameras, you can uh start to change the view so it is the best view for the virtual audience. Uh and the second thing that I really recommend is that most setups, including some ones from some very high and well-meaning organizations, don't have an audience camera. I can tell you the number one thing for a virtual audience is they want to know what the room looks like and how are people reacting to the speaker? So those are some of the secrets to the number and how we use our cameras.
SPEAKER_00:That's fantastic. Um I want to switch gears here for for a moment and talk a little bit about communication and and some barriers that may uh may exist. Um and just to see, you know, what what have you experienced? But you know, what strategies can be implemented to you know overcome these communication barriers and maintain some inclusivity among hybrid meeting attendees. Uh, you know, I I'm I'm sure that you have uh conducted these types of meetings where uh there might be language barriers, there might be you know individuals uh across the continent. Uh how do you work with that?
SPEAKER_01:Uh excellent question. I mean let me start with three simple tips from our meetings, and then we'll also hit some of these uh very cool inclusive pieces for language and other types of things. So in our virtual meetings, we coached our speakers to have uh to do these three things. Number one, acknowledge the virtual audience as soon as their talk begins. Just as simple as saying thank you so much to all our podcast listeners who are checking or who are checking in today. So that simple part just lets the pe the virtual audience know that the speaker knows that there's a virtual audience here. The second thing that we do is to make sure that we take the first question from virtual. And if there are no questions, then we'll go back to in-person. But by taking the first question from virtual, what we find is that uh that will make sure that we include both that virtual audience and the in-person audience. The virtual audience is again often forgotten. And then the third thing that we do is that again, if we can't get a microphone to somebody who's in the in-person audience, we coach our speakers to reply or uh repeat back what they said. So they said, uh, like while you're listening to this podcast, what emotions are you having? Someone might say curious and they wouldn't be able to hear them. So the speaker will repeat that word curious so that the virtual audience can make sure and hear them. So those are three simple tips. Do you have any questions before I move on to how to handle multiple languages?
SPEAKER_00:No, no, no. That that's absolutely fantastic. Um uh I do have another question, but it's it's gonna it's gonna go into the next section section. But go ahead, John.
SPEAKER_01:I uh so we have run programs that have already been simulcasted in eight languages. And yeah, it's a it's a super wow. And virtual gives us this technology. We may have seen it in something like the UN, United Nations, where people are wearing headsets and somebody can be speaking in any language, and people with headsets are receiving it in different languages. So on uh virtual platforms, often you can assign speakers or interpreters, right? Interpreters of that can interpret from one language to another, and you can choose to listen to that channel. And the first time you hear it, it's amazing that you can hear a program going on simultaneously, and we have these six different interpreters, things like Japanese, uh Spanish, Vietnamese, so that if you that was your native language, you could listen to this program correctly. And I believe that virtual has really brought this technology into a place that's very affordable, it's included with your account, it doesn't cost anything extra. The big challenge, of course, is you do still have to buy or rent or pay for your interpreters. Uh, we have seen where the language is part uh where I could speak English and I can be interpreted in Arabic or any of these other Italian uh and I can do that, and people have looked at it who were native speakers and said it's about 80 to 95% correct. But let me check this, Jeff. Jeff, how you ever in PowerPoint turn on the feature to show subtitles in different languages? Yeah. Now, Jeff, a lot of people don't know this feature, and so when they see it, it looks like a miracle in a live presentation or wherever, even in a virtual, you could actually go in and say, show it. I'm speaking in English, interpret into one of 45 different languages, and the captions will show on the screen as you talk.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is becoming absolutely phenomenal. And and with what you just said right there, it leads me into the next question, and it's uh and I do want to go back also to the communications and talk about culture, but um, since you hit on the the point of it absolutely actually capturing what you're saying, how does AI come into play with everything that you're doing right now? Because AI is gonna be everywhere. Um, how does that how does that play into all that you're doing?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, AI is so important now these days, and in the larger meetings, one of the things that I have the capability of doing is that when I uh record a meeting, is that the playback will already be smart chaptered by AI. It will already have a summary for each of the sections. So, for instance, in this interview, it could tell um you know, put a chapter, a smart chapter back on the place that we talked about how can technology be lived, uh be leveraged or key challenges to the organization. So you could jump through this interview and search and find for exactly what you want. And another way that I'm using this is that uh I, of course, have a lot of virtual meetings, sometimes upwards of 14 to 16 a day. And now I'm using the AI summary feature, which is fantastic because I can focus on the conversation, and now I copy and paste the summary that is AI generated into my notes. So the next time we talk, Jeff, I would remember that we talked about all these things. So those are just two easy ways, and there are multiple other ways where AI can really help uh in this field of being exclusive, inclusive, and having more engagement in your meetings.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And I'm and I'm sure every day something new is going to be coming about with AI that's gonna uh you know assist your efforts. Uh go back for a second, John, to communications. I want to talk about culture for a second. Um, you know, you mentioned you said, hey, we've we've had Italians and Arabic and Germans, and I mean the cultural differences that are the do you see that kind of across cultural uh areas that they're accepting this? Is it something that's becoming very acceptable throughout cultures?
SPEAKER_01:Well, one thing I can share with you that over the pandemic, it was amazing that I was hosting a class every day at noon, and I'd have people from all over, right? California, New York, Georgia. No, not Georgia the state, Jeff, Georgia the country. And so I do believe, you know, it really opened up the world at that time. Uh the second part is that I really feel that every organization has its own culture. Well, one of them might be the region that you're in. And so, for instance, I worked with a class that was from Korea, and it was definitely a cameras off people not very interacting at the beginning of the class. And so some people are naturally introverted, naturally extroverted. I also have seen corporations uh be camera on or camera off, for instance, as part of their culture. And I thought one of them was a big aerospace company came in in April of 2020, said that all their uh attendees or I'm sorry, all their uh employees were having meetings fatigue and they read the research on having cameras on, and then they mandated cameras off since April of 2020. Wow. You're missing all this body language, right? You can have it, which is communicating without us saying anything at all. But that's how some people created the culture. But one thing I can share with you, Jeff, that that kind of supersedes all these cultural differences is something called psychological safety. So, Jeff, I'm sure you may have heard of this, right?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So, psychological safety is usually defined as I feel safe taking a risk in this virtual meeting with you, either my friends, or my coworkers. And if you want a really great piece of research to follow it up with some exercises about how to increase it, is that you can go to Google Aristotle. Again, Google Aristotle did an 18-month research on high performance teams, and they found that the number one factor is psychological safety. So we have developed multiple technological as well as just in-person techniques to create greater psychological safety so that people more and more engage in the conversation, Jeff.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's fantastic, John. And and that term, uh, you know, sometimes you throw it on the in front of people and they don't really realize what it is, but it's so important right now in just a lot of areas that psychological, that just that safety, that uh people can, you know, feel that they can say something and and uh be open with their thoughts. And it's becoming a it's becoming a big business process right now. Um I have one more question for you, and then I'm gonna I'm gonna let you, you know, uh kind of close us up with some comments, and then I'll I'll uh of course close the entire session. But my last question for you is let's talk for a second about generational differences. Um you know, in the workforce right now, some say we I mean we have five different generations in there. Uh and you know, the variety of generations, there are different ways of doing things, their needs, and so forth. Uh what's your experience in who's accepting this type of stuff? The you know, the virtual meetings, the hybrid meetings, the technology, um, you know, when you got people that are 75 years old in the workforce and you got the 22 year olds, 22-year-olds that you know were born with a with technology in their hand. Um, what's your experience with that?
SPEAKER_01:Uh, that's a great question, too, because it is a little all over the map. And what I mean by that is usually, of course, the younger generation, uh, if they're more adept at this technology, have had an easier time uh you know adapting to this. Again, you my son just graduated college at University Puget Sound, and two or three of his years were all this virtual education. And so, you know, I'm just curious, you know, what impact is this pandemic going to have on our youth, you know, years down the road. So I'll be curious around that. And the other thing I saw, Jeff, is that during some of my classes, I met a gentleman who was 77 years old. He was retired, but uh, you know, the pandemic was kind of like April, very early on, nobody knew what to do. And he took one of my classes and he took almost everything that I taught and brought it back to his group of 20 or 30 other uh more you know senior-aged people, and so that they could learn how to do something and stay connected with their families and their friends and you know, do social activities, even though that we couldn't do it in the way that they were used to by being in person. And so there are people who were open to it, and if they were open to it, it did open a whole new world to them. And I think that is really a key because a lot of people have now discovered that they can work. I mean, another one of my very good friends who runs one of the top hybrid conferences uh for the Georgia Healthcare Association just let me know that she was able to move to Florida and still hold her vice president uh-based job in Georgia being remote.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, it it is. I and I think that what you what you said there, you know, some of the individuals that are in their you know, late 50s, 60s, 70s, and and I and I'll tell you, John, I've been teaching at National University for many years. I've had people in there of all ages. I think the highest, maybe the oldest I had was 75, 76, and and he did a phenomenal job, probably better than some of the 25 years, uh 25-year-olds. So, you know, it's all about accepting it and trying it out. But I I think that once individuals are you know uh accustomed to it and have experienced it um with an open mind, I think they find there's so many benefits. Because you are right, you can work virtually and and manage individuals uh appropriately from virtual environments. Uh so now fantastic, John. I I want to, before I close this up here, I I I want to open it up to you to you know to to kind of close off the conversation with anything that you want as far as uh what you're doing next. And uh I I know that you know you've been writing and you have, you know, you've got uh you've got material and books and so forth. Um for the audience, uh I'm gonna I'm gonna turn it over to you for a moment to kind of close us off and then and then I'll of course uh bring the session to a close. But um I'm gonna turn it over to you at this point.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much, Jeff. I would just want to share uh three short stories around hybrid. And for those who again who think that hybrid are too complicated, too expected, I mean, look at some of these key results. Recently I ran a hybrid for a high-end mastermind, 65 business owners, and two of the business owners got delayed on their airplanes on the way in. Uh, but because it was running hybrid, both of them were able to call in from their phones, from the airport that they were delayed at, and were able to watch and participate in all of the things that happened on day one of this program. So I think that's one of the important parts is uh to provide that access for however people want to do it. Uh sometimes it's travel, sometimes it's cost, there's lots of other different things. The second tip I can really give you is even in a hybrid, have both an in-person MC and a virtual MC. Again, an in-person MC and a virtual MC. And so I can tell you that the reason for that is that if you ever have any technology challenges or you want to make sure that your virtual is being received well by the virtual attendees, a virtual MC is always advocating for the virtual attendee. And that virtual MC can do things. Like here's here's another great one, Jeff is that uh we were in another conference in the keynote, and we lost audio, and I'm the virtual MC. And so I I jumped in immediately so the chat doesn't blow up going, we can't hear anything, right? So I was saying, okay, I confirmed that we lost audio. Let me go, let me check in with uh headquarters here. So I send a chat because I have a direct line to the technical team, and I said, Hey, we lost audio, what's up? And the reply was it's gonna be a while.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:So as a virtual MC, let me just check, Jeff. Have you ever heard of anything called PowerPoint karaoke?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I have now.
SPEAKER_01:So PowerPoint karaoke is is uh presenting a slide deck that you have never seen before, Jeff. That's the mode I jumped into. And so I started presenting this gentleman's slide deck in the presentation because we have no audio. I have no control of whenever he changes slides, but I did a 32 minutes of a 60-minute presentation, uh, and it was around using the five love languages to retain your uh your employees. And when they came back on, the audio came back on, the virtual audience asked two questions, and then they came back and the chat blew up again. And this time they said, Oh my gosh, John, you nailed this presentation. You got it 100% right. Uh, but the last one I'm gonna give you here is a GSM Con or something known as government social media, a 950 in-person conference and a 700-person virtual conference, where many of the attendees said because they're on government budgets, they would not be able to attend, or they would have only sent one person as opposed to getting four people all the education for this. And uh as an MC, I've been able to do things like number one, make sure that the virtual is really you know delivering all the content and things that they want. But we also bring energy, we bring fun, we bring music, we acknowledge the virtual attendees out there. And it got so good that one of them said, if John Chen is not gonna MC next year, I'm not gonna register. So uh I just want to just share that that's a best practice to have a great virtual MC, somebody who's always gonna advocate for that virtual audience no matter how they choose to participate.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm sure, John, that that takes uh uh um someone with some skill, uh, some communications and and the ability to do exactly what you did, which I'm gonna steal your phrase there, uh PowerPoint karaoke, um, you know, to think on the fly and to react quickly. Um so you know, it does take a take a person uh with some abilities to do that and to do it right. Don't you agree?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And and uh National Speakers Association, of which I am a member and actually earn their what's called certified speaking professional. I'm only one of 400 active speakers who have it. They actually publish a guide to selecting virtual, in-person, and hybrid MCs. And so look for that guide and use that if you happen to need or want to look for a virtual MC. It'll share one of the best ways to like ask questions and interview them.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. Well, John, with re uh with respect of people's time, I'm gonna close this up here. And it's been a total pleasure chatting with you, and I've enjoyed learning from this conversation as well. And um, thank you very much for supporting the Center for the Advancement of Virtual Organizations at National University. Uh, doing some great things there, and I'm confident our listeners will benefit uh from the great information you shared. It's been a wonderful conversation, John, and thank you so much for what you do to bring new technology uh out to the industry uh and engage individuals in in uh new things, new techniques, and uh new concepts that are out there. Thank you so much, John.
SPEAKER_01:You're welcome in Google Cavo.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, John. Take care.