From Live to HIVE: Creating a Highly Interactive Virtual Experience
In 2020, the world changed. We bet you remember! Live training and conferences disappeared overnight. Schools closed. We all learned who Dr. Fauci was. Your favorite restaurant changed to take-out only.
On Your Feet had to change too, but we still wanted to deliver on our mission of “less fear and more joy” for our clients.
Here’s that story of change.
Once upon a time, way back in 2019, we traveled the world delivering highly experiential face-to-face content to large and small audiences for Uber.
Every quarter we went to Uber offices in exciting places like São Paulo, New York City, Hyderabad, San Francisco, and Amsterdam and connected face-to-face in energetic and personal ways. We were a perfect match! Uber, a company that’s all about networking and personal contact (often between strangers) and us, an improv and experiential-based firm.
But one day in early 2020, travel mostly stopped and we were apart from our Uber clients. Then shortly after, most offices closed, and Uber employees were apart from each other too.
We all thought, “Well, I am sure this won’t last long.” And then, after a few weeks with no improvement we thought, “Yes, it will!”
And because of that, we and Uber both knew we needed to find a way to keep the experience and connection alive, keep training going forward, and improvise new ways of doing things.
Because of that, On Your Feet began to design what would become our new focus: virtual experiences. We went back to the drawing board to find a new way to do what we’d always done in face-to-face training. This challenged us to translate our work into the distributed world.
Because of that, we experimented and started to learn more about this new way of working. A bunch of things worked great that we just kept doing: interactivity and high energy, tools, applying those tools to real life, and learning through doing.
We learned what we needed a bit more of: structure, consistent application of the science behind the work, brevity, better-looking materials, methods to help people learn and remember content, and, in one bright moment, how to use Gordon Lightfoot’s song “If You Could Read My Mind” to explain why clear communication is essential.
Because of that, we created HIVEs, Highly Interactive Virtual Experiences.
Because of that, we discovered new possibilities, like how to incorporate the physical environments of home offices around the world by playing “Scavenger Hunt,” how to create rapid-fire breakouts to build affinity quickly on Zoom, and how to use improv to demonstrate the use of story to engage audiences.
Because of that, we were able to deliver four tailored 90-minute courses on Communication, Storytelling, and Influence in a total of 25 HIVEs to 300 Uber employees in India, Mexico, the US, Brazil, the Netherlands, and the Philippines, without any airfare costs!
Because of that, we learned that 9:30 pm PST is an ideal time to deliver work in India, even though that is TOMORROW for them. So basically “you can time travel” is how we are seeing this.
Until finally we realized that even though we are not in the room, we can still reach people and deliver on our mission of less fear, more joy, and better results.
Ever since then we have started to develop more HIVEs on new content, delivering them to clients around the US and the world, all from the various home offices of On Your Feet’s staff.
And the moral of the story? When the world changes, adapt. In other words, when you can’t get on a plane, get in the HIVE.
For more on why to use HIVEs, check out our HIVEs page.
By Brad Robertson
Brad is a partner at On Your Feet.
