How exactly does a group event work when participants are separated by distance?

Drumming the Distance is not new to us – here’s how we did it in six remote sites simultaneously.

The Federal Reserve approached us because they wanted to do an all-hands meeting and that had 200 participants in the Atlanta Federal Reserve Office plus five other smaller offices in a variety of other places including Florida & North Carolina.

We began by coordinating drums to be sent to all locations and arranging AV connections between the six locations. A person in each location was in charge of the video conferencing equipment and was there to make sure that the AV ran smoothly, and the sound worked and the visuals worked.

We took all the 200 people who were in the Federal Reserve Building and we put them in the canteen. We had set up the canteen with a drum on every chair.

At the back of the room was a large video screen and on that video screen, there were five different blocks. Each block represented one of the other offices.

We started the event in Atlanta and all the other locations started at exactly the same time, so we had a rhythmic connected, real-time opening.

Each one of them heard me perfectly clearly, heard my team, and the music coming from the Atlanta office perfectly clearly.

I engaged with each one of those five offices by going into the audience and speaking directly to them via the screen because they could all see me and I could see them.

I would integrate each group with a drum roll welcome for each office, bringing them into the engagement so that they felt completely part of the engagement, as did those people who were sitting in Atlanta.