{"id":4404,"date":"2023-09-29T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=4404"},"modified":"2023-09-29T09:16:18","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T16:16:18","slug":"chasing-the-sun-with-a-live-event-in-microsoft-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/chasing-the-sun-with-a-live-event-in-microsoft-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing the sun with a live event in Microsoft Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Microsoft[Editor\u2019s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we\u2019re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]<\/em><\/p>\n

How do you connect people across 48 countries for a global team meeting? Nathalie D\u2019Hers\u2019 team is one of the most far-flung at Microsoft\u2014the 500-plus people in her organization are scattered across the globe, with at least one employee working in nearly every major Microsoft office.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith an organization so geographically distributed, it\u2019s hard to keep everyone aligned and on the same page, and to create a sense of community unless you get together at least once a year,\u201d says D\u2019Hers, corporate vice president for Employee Experience, the team behind delivering the company\u2019s productivity tools and services to company employees. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019ve always had an in-person meeting once a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

That thinking shifted three years ago, when D\u2019Hers didn\u2019t have budget to fly everyone to a central location. She didn\u2019t want to lose the substantial benefit of bringing everyone together, so she decided to get creative.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy team thought I was a little crazy when I suggested we have an 18-hour continuous virtual meeting to ensure that we could span all time zones,\u201d D\u2019Hers says. \u201cThey wanted to know how we could pull something like that off. I felt, as a technology company if anyone could do it, we could.\u201d<\/p>\n

After much preparation and logistics work, her team successfully delivered and participated in an 18-hour rally that brought the team together \u201cin a rousingly successful manner,\u201d D\u2019Hers says.<\/p>\n

It was so successful, in fact, that she decided to try it again this year\u2014all 18 hours of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt worked\u2014we did it again,\u201d says D\u2019Hers, still recovering from a meeting that started at 11 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday, February 25th, and that didn\u2019t end for another 18 hours, at 5 p.m. Pacific Time the next day. The meeting was broken into four-hour increments due to current product design. \u201cWe were able to deliver greater clarity for everyone, as far as what we want to accomplish over the next year, and we really saw the team come together.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the secret behind the success?<\/p>\n

D\u2019Hers says it was how the technology faded into the background, so much so that employees started to forget that it was there\u2014partly because they literally got caught up in the story of the meeting.<\/p>\n

\"D\u2019Hers
Nathalie D\u2019Hers gives the keynote address to her team of more than 500 Microsoft employees at the start of an 18-hour virtual team meeting held on live events in Microsoft 365. D\u2019Hers is corporate vice president for Employee Experience in Microsoft Digital. (Photo by Jim Adams | Inside Track)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That on its own wasn\u2019t enough to make the meeting successful, however.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also knew we had to do something to draw people in\u2014they were intrigued last time because we had never held a virtual meeting before, it was new and they wanted to see if it would work,\u201d she says. \u201cThe newness factor wasn\u2019t going to work this time, so we had to do something different.\u201d<\/p>\n

She did it by asking everyone on the team to help tell the definitive story of her team.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe assigned teams of people from each of the time zones to get together in specific Teams channels on Microsoft 365 to tell their chapter of our overall story,\u201d D\u2019Hers says. \u201cIt was up to them to figure out how their part should go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the sun, each collection of storytellers reported out their chapter in time-zone order, something that generated a lot of energy in all the offices that the team has scattered around the world. \u201cAt the end of the meeting, we wove all of those chapters together into one big story about our team, and I wrapped up the meeting with an epilogue that I used to tie everything together,\u201d D\u2019Hers says. \u201cOne of the most fun things I got to do was read the story back to the team at the end of the meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

D\u2019Hers\u2019 intention was to create clarity and alignment around what the group is trying to accomplish while also fostering a sense of community and team spirit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was incredibly impressed by how the story came together in a very seamless way and the way it highlighted the amazing diversity and talent we have across the organization,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

As for the story, it was a tale that started in Australia and New Zealand, zipped to Japan, stopped in China, zoomed to Singapore, travelled to India, made several stops in Africa, Asia, and Europe, before heading to South America, Canada, and finally to the United States and company headquarters in Redmond, Washington. To make things even more interesting, each team of storytellers could only see what the location before them had written. It wasn\u2019t until the end of the meeting that everyone was able to hear how their chapter fit into the larger story.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sun never sets on our team,\u201d the story starts out saying, weaving in the tale of individual employee experiences, group accomplishments, and enthusiastic team building. D\u2019Hers wrote in the epilogue that she feels an immense sense of pride and gratitude for how much heart and effort her team poured into the meeting.<\/p>\n

The best technology fades into the background.<\/p>\n

The experience of running this year\u2019s virtual meeting was better than the first one because the company\u2019s large meeting technology is much better.<\/p>\n

The new capabilities were not so much for the people attending the meeting\u2014most of the improvements in the product were aimed at the people running the event itself. It worked so much better this time around while being seamless to the audience.<\/p>\n

The team also got an important assist from outside the company.<\/p>\n

One critical aspect that also made this 18-hour event such a great success was the help we got from a third-party real-time monitoring solution. It gave us the ability to have live monitoring of video buffering, see how much bandwidth viewers were using, and also track how many people were attending the meeting at any one time.<\/p>\n

Years ago, the company\u2019s large meeting offering was Skype Meeting Broadcast, a one-way feed that had to be hacked to allow teams to report in live from around the world. Since then, Microsoft has moved to the new live events capability that is part of Microsoft 365, a threaded large meeting offering that includes Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, and Microsoft Stream.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used all three platforms to help us run the meeting,\u201d says Fred Van Camp, a senior IT service manager also on D\u2019Hers\u2019 team in Microsoft Digital. \u201cViva Engage allowed our viewers to talk with each other or the presenter using Viva\u2019s persistent chat capability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another big improvement this time around was how well the live events technology worked with Microsoft Teams. For example, if a viewer asked an ad hoc question during the live broadcast of the meeting, the production team used a custom-made configuration to connect her or him to the meeting via a Teams call using a studio managed encoder.<\/p>\n

Everything worked better together.<\/p>\n

When it was time to start bringing in teams from places like Australia, the Netherlands, and Brazil, it was easy as making a call. \u201cIt was pretty straightforward, we were just making normal Teams calls,\u201d Van Camp says. \u201cWe just called them, and our video production team seamlessly patched them into the webcast.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was about the technology doing its job.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to see the technology disappear,\u201d Van Camp says. \u201cThe whole show flow was built in such a way that the technology just faded into the background. It was very cool to see it all come together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another big difference this time is that viewers could view and engage in the meeting from mobile devices, either on their mobile device or in browser.<\/p>\n

And for the people that missed any part of the 18-hour event, it was easy for them to catch up with the recording of the event\u2014after the event ended, the broadcast stream was automatically uploaded as a video on demand on Microsoft Stream.<\/p>\n

Van Camp added, \u201cThe event recording in Stream made it easy for everyone to search for keywords in the auto populated transcript so they could quickly find the moments most important to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

D\u2019Hers says her team\u2019s experience will be fed back into the product groups so that it can learn from the unique way her team is meeting. \u201cWe leverage our own technology internally as much as possible,\u201d she says. \u201cWe have a responsibility to identify further product opportunities, and to relay those back to the product groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

The product group appreciates how Microsoft Digital is putting the live event technology through its paces.<\/p>\n

Weaving in the human element<\/h2>\n

Switching to the live events capability made it much easier to generate a sense of community during the global meeting.<\/p>\n

We were focused on stimulating conversation on Viva Engage. We steered as much of the conversation into that feed so we could hear from as many people as possible. That really helped build a sense of, \u201dwe\u2019re in this together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many great conversations spun up in Viva Engage, including several on the collective story that the team wrote together. \u201cAnd those conversations won\u2019t end now that the meeting is over,\u201d she says. \u201cThe idea was to get people to talking with teammates they don\u2019t usually talk to, and we saw lots of people making new friends and finding new people to collaborate with.\u201d<\/p>\n

For her part, D\u2019Hers\u2019 walks away from the virtual meeting with a feeling of accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still want to have in-person meetings\u2014you get a lot of value out of meeting face-to-face,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I also like what we were able to do virtually. I feel like we were successful in landing our all up vision for the group and building the sense of connection that we need to have to be successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The meeting worked so well because the team brought energy and enthusiasm. \u201cWe didn\u2019t just get through it, we made it very special,\u201d D\u2019Hers says. \u201cI think people walked away with a sense of pride and excitement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Related<\/p>\n