The Oriflame Cosmetics is the large international organization with offices all over the world. Of course, it is extremely important to maintain a well-coordinated work and corporate culture in such a large structure. In Oriflame's philosophy, the cornerstone of corporate culture has always been live communication and emotions, and the offline format of internal events was ideally suited for it. But the 2020 year and the pandemic came, and offline was out of the question. The company had to look for a new format of communication and motivation of people. It is clear that it should be online - but how to keep the emotional charge and the feeling of the team?
As a result, Oriflame Cosmetics together with MAX \ MAX Productions managed not only to solve this issue, but also to reach a new level and hold the largest corporate event in the history of the company for 3,000 people - CEO Connect!
One of the most important factors of all Oriflame events is to receive feedback from the participants - to hear their thoughts and plans for the future “from the stage,” to address their colleagues and the company's management. To do this, it was necessary to receive video and audio signal from each participant, which would be displayed on the screen in the studio and the general broadcast.
CEO Connect was a pilot project of this type for internal employees, and this time the total number of participants was planned to be about 3,000. Taking into account the task described above to get feedback from such a large number of people, Zoom was chosen as the communication service. Several factors spoke in favor of it at once:
- Tariff plans that allow up to 1000 conference participants with video at the same time
- Zoom is the most popular online conference service in the world - and its interface is familiar to almost everyone
- The popularity of the service also guarantees the reliability of the servers for so many simultaneous connections
- Built-in simultaneous translation function
- Pretty simple setup of incoming video and audio signals from external sources
- Cost-efficiency: low-cost rates for large conferences
Well, based on the information listed above, the next step looks pretty clear: You need to create three conferences for 1,000 people each, correctly send out links to everyone and voila, the event took place. But everything turned out to be "a little more complicated."
Within the framework of the event, the Loyalty Awards ceremony was to be held, in which groups of employees who have dedicated 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 years to the company were awarded in turn. And within each category, it was necessary to show the Zoom-windows of exactly those employees who correspond to the nomination, in order to distinguish them among their colleagues and give them their "minute of glory." In addition, it is necessary to get in touch with a random representative of each category, to give him opportunity to make his speech and share his emotions.
Since Zoom is primarily a communication service, this functionality of filtering participants is not implemented in it. Yes, it has Breakout Rooms, but they open and close all at once, and the awards go one after the other. And if you implement this task through Breakout Rooms in one conference, participants from other categories will constantly "jump" into the room and back, which is quite uncomfortable.
Therefore, each category of awardees was defined in a separate Zoom account to have a gallery of Zoom windows consisting only of them, and this gallery was already displayed on the screen. And to communicate with the user, his window was "pinned" by means of Zoom and large displayed on the screen for a live conversation with the CEO in the studio.
Due to the short preparation time and budget constraints, it was not possible to develop a virtual environment and a software add-on that would allow us to work with Zoom windows more smoothly and automatically. Therefore, all these actions were performed manually by a special person, and the host-laptops from each account were located in one place on the backstage.
Another interesting challenge was showrunning. The MAX \ MAX team, which was the developers of the virtual logistics of the event and its directors, due to COVID-19 restrictions, could not fly from Moscow to Stockholm to manage the event on the venue. The solution for managing rehearsals and shows was also found by connecting the Zoom conference and the intercom system on the remote control, so that the director could directly give commands to each specialist.
Read more about the event here!
Oleg Nikituk is the project manager of MAX \ MAX productions. MAX \ MAX - is the show production & stage design company, specialized on the concerts for Russian pop stars, large scale corporate and private events.