Engaging Users to Take Control: Reducing Distractions During Virtual Events
Research shows that our physical environments significantly influence our cognition, emotions, and behavior, affecting our decision-making and experiences.
As recent global events have unfolded, one of the more obvious changes we have seen is the move to online environments for conferences, events and other meetings. However, while this rapid uptake in virtual events and meetings has helped to mitigate some of the social and economic issues created by lockdowns and distancing, it has also created new challenges.
With offices closed or minimally occupied, we are attending our virtual meetings not from our usual work environment, but from our home offices, which are often less than ideal. Not everyone has access to a dedicated home office in a separate room – people are sitting on sofas or at a kitchen bar, at a dining table or other space they’re sharing with family members. These environments are filled with distractions and obstacles that pull a participant’s focus from the event, creating significant challenges for companies planning online events of any kind.
The Key Challenges in Designing a Virtual Event
The combination of two dynamic shifts – how we’re working (virtually) and where we’re working (at home) – means we need to understand this new virtual approach to collaboration and communication while simultaneously adapting to a new daily work environment. Each of these dynamic shifts brings their own challenges, but there are three specific issues that must be overcome to maximize the effectiveness of an attendee’s experience: lack of environmental control, lack of social pressure to participate, and lack of automatic “event processes”.
The first issue is that event organizers lack control over the environment in the virtual world. While an event design team may carefully craft the virtual environment for maximum effectiveness, each attendee experiences an event from their own surroundings, which may have distractions, poor lighting, poor audio quality, and so on. These factors – which are completely out of the event organizer’s control – can negate much of the work put in to the virtual platform and reduce the effectiveness of the overall presentation.
The second issue is with attendee engagement and focus. At a traditional live event, attendees can remain focused on the material as it is presented, in part through the social pressure of sitting in a room where everyone else is also focused and professional in their attitude towards the presentation. Those social pressures disappear in a virtual event – there is no room full of colleagues or peers to encourage compliance. Retaining attendee engagement and focus is another layer of complexity that organizers must address in the event design.
The third issue is user responsibility. At any live meeting or event, the basic elements of participation are pre-set and understood: arrival, connecting with colleagues, attending a meeting or conference session, and paying attention to the material presented — these things are all automatically part of the process. However, in a virtual event, that “automated” process is less clear. The onus is more heavily placed on each individual to be prepared, to find a distraction-free environment, to log in at the right time and to stay engaged to be able to get the most from any session.
Each of these issues present real challenges for virtual event success. We’ll examine each issue and look at how an event management team can mitigate the risks and deliver a successful virtual experience.
Environmental Control: How to Immerse an Audience Wherever They May Be
At a traditional live event, organizers can create the perfect environment through the event design process, managing everything from the layout of the room to sound and lighting, and eliminating as many distractions as possible. With a virtual event, there is suddenly a secondary environment to take into account.
While it is still important to ensure that the aspects that can be controlled are refined and effective, the reality is that no matter how much attention is given to the broadcast environment, event teams have no control over the environment from which users view their content.
There are so many factors that contribute to an attendee’s focus and attentiveness: having the right lighting, creating a distraction-free workspace, finding a comfortable position, and having good equipment (audio quality, screen size and resolution, and camera effectiveness) all contribute to user engagement.
Keeping a participant’s focus throughout the event matters – studies have shown that it takes an average of nearly 25 minutes to regain focus once we are distracted (Mark, Gudith, and Klocke, 2008).That is a lot of lost time. What’s more, a constant cycle of distraction and engagement in and of itself causes fatigue and further loss of concentration.
This is particularly applicable to the virtual environment. Working remotely from home – and attending meetings and events virtually – is relatively new to most users. Most of us are not prepared for this new remote work life because it lacks the routines – the commute, the morning coffee, the in-person meeting structure – that cue us to focus. Whether or not we know it, we maintain a ‘home’ mindset as we settle into the couch to attend a meeting.
To address this challenge, we need to immerse every user in an event to shift their mindset and get them focused. With a pro-active approach, you can encourage users to create the environment you know will offer the greatest engagement.
CREATE FOCUS
Encourage attendees to use headphones to reduce or eliminate exterior distractions and further immerse an attendee in your event. If possible, use 3D sound as it a great way to create a level of sensory inclusion in the event.
Provide attendees a series of mental exercises to improve mindset and focus. The aim is to improve focus and encourage the shift to a work mindset that might be missing when an attendee is at home. These can be simple activities – such as discussing the goals of the session – that help refocus attention on the task at hand (your event).
Relax the event schedule. Unlike a live event where the costs per day – meeting space, catering, speaker costs, accommodations, etc. – can be prohibitive and packing more into a shorter timeframe is desirable, a virtual event can be spread over a number of days without dramatic additional costs, allowing users to carve out more focused moments.
As a virtual event organizer, you can never control each user’s environment in the same way you can for a live event, but you can guide users in the right direction to ensure they have the best chance of an immersive event experience.
Social Pressure: How to Create the Social Experience Online
Much of our behavior as social creatures is dictated by social norms – most of which we absorb in our formative years. It becomes an automatic response – a sort of programming that we may not even notice – to specific environments and situations. Language, for example: how we speak to colleagues and managers in a professional environment is likely very different than how we converse with friends outside of work. You do this, probably without thinking about it. The principles are the same with events. Attending a traditional live in-person event with colleagues and peers reminds us that this is a professional setting. We behave accordingly – maintaining focus, being attentive, and arriving on time are all things we automatically know we must do to conform to expected behavior.
When working from home, that social expectancy decreases or disappears. There are no cues to trigger an automatic response relating to an online event. Suddenly, there is no imperative to attend a session, to focus on the content, or to participate.
However, you can design your event to include activities to help users feel some of that social pressure to keep them on track and focused on the event.
CREATE CONNECTION AND MOTIVATION
Promote interactivity throughout the event – develop activities that involve live connections. BrainDates, for example, encourage one-on-one conversations with other attendees and bring an authentic event feel to your meeting. A live chat or comment system will allow interaction between users. A karma-based commenting system – one in which attendee comments are rated or valued in some way – can take it a step further and deliver the social pressure you need.
Use workshops and other sessions that encourage two-way communications – by video or moderated chat function – rather than simply presenting information to the audience. This increases immersion and helps create user investment in the event.
To create some motivation for engagement, create a friendly competition – complete with point accumulation and leaderboards showing usernames – to offer a complete event experience for attendees.
By reminding users that they are part of a social group, despite being physically separated, you are still able to generate some social pressure and create the right mindset for productive engagement throughout the event.
User Responsibility
In addition to environment and social pressure, the advantage of a physical live event is that the organizer has some level of control over their audience. A one- or two-day event likely means a full schedule that is distributed to each attendee, so they understand where they need to be, when they need to be there, what they need to have with them, and how they are expected to behave before, during and after any session.
In a virtual event, that context disappears, and subconsciously, users may become unsure. Many elements of the event become their own responsibility, from creating the right environment for learning to avoiding distractions, from ensuring they log in at the right time to creating their own schedule when on-demand content is available. This is a particular issue for virtual events where users are joining from different time zones or when sessions are hosted outside their regular work schedule.
Creating the right workspace can also be a significant issue where timing is concerned. Studies have shown that employees can waste considerable time and energy on regulating their poorly designed workspaces rather than focusing on the work itself. While preferences vary from person-to-person, the challenges in regulating a workspace are generally related to indirect lighting, mechanical ventilation rates, access to natural light, furniture and, the acoustic environment. These issues require both motivation and effort to address.
The challenge for event organizers, then, is to ensure that users are given guidance and incentives to create the ideal environment to maximize their engagement, focus and attentiveness throughout the event.
CREATE USER RESPONSIBILITY
In the same way an airline communicates key information just before take-off, create a “pre-flight” communication that transfers some of the responsibility for the event experience to the user. Offer suggestions – such as clearing a desk, closing blinds, removing distractions, using headphones, etc. – to help participants optimize their space to be able to focus on the event content.
Remind users of the benefits of active participation, which will overtly and subconsciously encourage positive behavior. After all, no one wants a less-than-optimal experience if they can control it.
Offer technical systems support before the event to help users configure cameras and microphones for optimal performance before the event goes live.
Taking a proactive approach means event organizers help users understand their responsibility in creating the right conditions to maximize their event experience.
Taking the Lead
Common to all the solutions for these issues is the need for a proactive approach. There is a disconnect between a virtual event experience and our normal work and event experiences which lies at the heart of the challenges that event organizers face when trying to engage users.
Providing support and guidance beforehand empowers attendees to make the right preparations for the event, which in turn promotes the right mindset for professional engagement, essentially bridging that disconnect between work and working from home.
Organizers should consider attendee engagement an integral aspect of event design. With these measures in place, you can be confident in delivering an engaging, valued experience that users will find immersive and informative.
