Hybrid meetings in Bangkok
How to organize a successful hybrid meeting in Bangkok
Online meetings have become popular during the Coronavirus crisis and hybrid meetings are the next big thing on the pipeline.
As Thailand has had no new cases of Covid-19 in the past 48 days (as of date of writing), the Thai government is considering opening up flight routes to China and South-East Asian destinations. The first tourists allowed back into the country are medial tourists, followed by MICE travelers from Covid-free destinations.
During the Covid-induced lockdown, many companies were forced to introduced working from home policies. Important regional meetings have been postponed or done online. But online meetings are not as good as face to face meetings, and will never entirely replace meetings with personal contact. If you want to know more about hybrid meetings or if you are interested in knowing why face-to-face meetings are better suited for some purposes than online meetings, please check out our Blog Post What is a hybrid meeting and why has it become so popular (link).
So if you are a multinational company and wish to organize a Hybrid meeting in Bangkok, what do you do?
1. Clarify your objectives
This should be done at least 6 months before the event date. There are hundreds of blog posts written about meeting objectives and we do not need to re-invent the wheel. Just google it, "How to set your meeting objectives". But for those who like the short-cut, here are a few aspects to consider.
Unsurprisingly, most organizations inter-regional meetings have similar objectives. These are, in order of most important to least important:
Team building, in this case we mean getting to know each other better and on a personal level.
Relationship building.
Aligning the team among common objectives.
Communicating the most important targets for the year.
Recognizing well-performing workers.
Exploring the destination.
Enjoying yourself and having a good time.
It is no surprise that team building is on the top of the agenda, most other things you can do online, even communicating targets to some extend. But building relationships is hard nut to crack, and you will never get the feel for it online.
2. Make a preliminary budget
Yes, making a budget is the second thing you should do, without a clear vision of how much you can spend, it is difficult to plan any further. For most organizations, making a budget is easy because they have done a similar gig before. Just look up the numbers, adjust them up or down (probably down during an economic crisis) and have a bulk figure in mind when continuing with step 3.
Your financial controller may be excited to hear that hybrid meetings are 60 to 80% cheaper than conventional meetings. Yes, up to 80%!
If you should be new to the job, or work in an organization who has never organized a regional meeting before, don't bother, and just jump right to point 6. We will provide the budget for you.
3. Have a good idea of who your participants are.
At least five months prior to the event date, make a preliminary list of participants in an excel spreadsheet with names, positions, nationality, birthday, passport number and add a column "in person" / "online".
4. Decide on on-site and off-site participants.
Here comes the difficulty. You must decide who you spend the real buck on, meaning people who join in person, and people who join online. The difficulty also lies in communicating to people that they are joining online instead of in person, so tact and emotional intelligence is important. But you may soon realize some people actually hate to travel and would rather join a meeting online. The big shots of your company, CEO and executive team with perhaps another dozen of "highly aspirational talents" should attend in person.
5. Make a preliminary agenda and set the dates.
This is typically done by the CEO or General manager of the organization together with the department heads in an executive meeting. They will find a date that everybody can attend. Don't bother asking 40 people for a convenient date, they will never agree. You could also argue that setting the dates should be done earlier, like number two or three.
6. Find a local partner to organize hybrid meetings in Bangkok.
Finding your local partner should not be difficult, there are only a handful of organizations specialized in running hybrid meetings, and Beunite Co. Ltd. is one of them. By the time you contact the local partner, it would be ideal if point 1 to point 5 has already been prepared.
If not, we can certainly help you with this. We will also provide you with some sample Meeting and Team Building packages with hotel recommendations and price per head for you to consider.
We will further discuss which sessions of the meeting will be live-streamed and which ones will be for the on-site participants only. It is important to understand that the off-site participants will get a summary of the event. For those sessions we decide to stream, off-site participants can interact, ask questions and be completely engaged in the session.
For more information about hybrid meetings in Bangkok, please do not hesitate to contact us at info(at)beunite.com or call directly to my WhatsApp +66 84 629 05 07.