The challenge

During summer 2021, it was time for ISS World Services’ annual Global Leadership Conference (GLC) – a highly prestigious and appreciated event with ISS’ top 400 leaders. However, this year the digital workplace unit were forced to rethink the setup.

How do you make a virtual event engaging and inclusive?

As with all other meetings and events for the past 1,5 year, the GLC had to be reinvented and adjusted to the circumstances and travel restrictions caused by Covid-19. The event had to be carried out virtually – but in a way where the quality and experience remained high.

The ambitious digital workplace unit at ISS accepted the challenge to host a large-scale virtual GLC for the first time in ISS’ history. The goal was to make an interactive and engaging event, where attendees from all 23 countries would feel included.

Our approach

Together, ISS and VENZO needed to digitize the conference and fully utilize the technological opportunities of Microsoft platforms. More specifically, the event would be facilitated as a Live Event backed up by Teams, Videos, News, Schedules, Channels, and SharePoint integrations to engage the attendees in both social and professional manners.

All elements needed to work simultaneously together in an entertaining GLC universe to create a virtual version of the acknowledged event. Therefore, VENZO provided technical expertise to the Microsoft platforms – especially the Teams Live Event functionality, along with establishing participant engagement initiatives on Teams.

In order to prepare for the event and ensure that everything would be running smoothly, the process was carried out in four phases:

1. Assessing all technical and user experience requirements
2. Creating checklists and project plan for the event requirements
3. Executing pre-event tests and setups along with an IT support video production
4. Running live stream and manning stream and IT support functions

The result

A strong collaboration between ISS’ digital workplace unit, VENZO and Microsoft facilitated a virtual, engaging and inclusive event to high satisfaction of all attendees.

Attendee evaluation rating: 4,67 out of 5.

ISS and VENZO have a long history of collaboration, which resulted in frictionless alignment of expectations as well as complete professional trust towards each other. Likewise, there was a well functioning synergy between ISS, VENZO and Microsoft, who all participated in the planning and execution of the event.

In reaching ISS’ goals for the event, VENZO:

• Set up and ran a pre-engagement Teams community for attendees with a specially designed Teams site for news, schedules, videos etc.
• Performed a two-day live stream in high quality to 23 countries, with no breakdowns, due to a well prepared technical setup with thorough testing
• Provided a participant support channel with a dedicated telephone number

ISS is a leading facilities management and employee experience company with 30+ locations globally.

For more information about Teams services by VENZO, please contact

Joachim Dissing
IT Architect
jdi@venzo.com
+45 2843 9503