We’ve all been to conferences, meetings or events like this…
A senior leader asks for questions from the stage, and the usual suspect stands up and hogs the microphone. Then, all too often, they go on to ‘showboat’ rather than offer meaningful contributions.
Meanwhile, the other 499 people in the room feel excluded – despite having something brilliant to say. If you are lucky, they will share their thoughts with a few friends during the coffee break, but sadly the whole meeting misses out on their insights.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
With careful event design, purposeful interactivity and professional facilitation, you can create an experience that goes beyond diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to build a genuine sense of belonging.
In this blog, Axiom’s founder and Managing Director, Chris Carey, and subject matter expert, Jiten Patel, explore the why and the how.
The case for inclusion and belonging at conferences
Google’s Project Aristotle found that ‘as long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well. But if only one person, or a small group, spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’
This insight alone makes a strong case for greater interactivity and inclusion across in-person, virtual, and hybrid events. Add to that the evidence that innovation is increased through inclusion, and better decisions are made through diversity, and surely the case is proven.
To make this work, participants need to feel psychologically safe, and the opportunity to ‘speak up’ must be equitable and accessible for all. But why stop there? With the competition for talent increasingly hitting the headlines, why not use our meetings and events to help people feel they belong?
Harvard Business Review reports that employees who feel they belong show a 56% increase in performance, a 50% reduction in staff turnover risk (lowering recruitment and onboarding costs), and a 75% decrease in sick days. The connection between belonging and wellbeing is clear.
Six significant signals of success
Design an experience you want your conference speakers and participants to enjoy, and you can look forward to:
- Increased innovation and better decisions – ‘Groupthink’ narrows outcomes, whereas diverse perspectives leave the door open to fresh, even breakthrough, insights
- Enhanced engagement and belonging – Do things with conference participants, not to them. Ensure they feel seen, heard and valued, as part of a vibrant cohort
- Contribution from all communities – Inclusion should extend across sex, race, age, and more, so let’s go further and embrace cognitive diversity too and include ‘quiet’ colleagues
- A positive reputation as an employer – Align the rhetoric of your annual reports and website with the reality of your people’s lived experience – especially at your events
- A showcase for emerging talent – Give your people the opportunity to shine and you will reveal their brilliance, especially if you give them development to equip them to thrive
- Reflect the world we live in – You work in a wonderful world full of diversity, so that should be reflected in your speaker panel. To inspire the entire workforce, ‘See one to be one’ should guide your thinking.
What are you talking about?
This figure of speech is the last thing you want participants to be saying about conference speakers, in hushed tones during coffee breaks! So how do you make sure you are addressing the hot topics on the minds of participants, as well as those leading the organisation? Ask them!
You wouldn’t dream of running a live event without asking the leaders what they want to discuss. So why not ask the people they are talking to? You might find there is no overlap whatsoever, or you were planning your meeting during a school holiday, or a clash with a cultural celebration.
At Axiom, we call this ‘pre-search‘. It helps you take a balanced approach to content creation, addressing the needs of participants and speakers in equal measure. It will also help you co-create meaningful goals for your event; goals that guide every action you take, what you include and what you rule out.
It also ensures you identify any specific requirements early, so reasonable adjustments can be put in place.
These may include:
- Venue choice and access considerations
- Subtitling or sign-language provision
- Seating proximity to screens
- Dietary requirements
- Translation services
- Preferred learning styles
- Availability of quiet spaces.
Getting these things right is essential. Getting them wrong can undermine inclusion and mean participants cannot focus on what you are talking about.
Design meaningful interactivity to drive inclusion
Inclusion must never be, nor appear to be, an afterthought, squeezed in to a tightly packed agenda. Conference participants will spot that instantly, and it will probably alienate them, which is the opposite of what you had in mind.
A few practical principles:
Use language intentionally. Signal your intent, and your expectations, by referring to your conference goers as ‘participants’, not delegates – or worse still, attendees.
Help participants prepare. Share an outline agenda in the run-up to the event, highlighting where you genuinely want their insights and input.
Make arrival welcoming and simple. Plenty of signage, be that physical, or verbal pointers, will help people feel welcome, and orient them with the conference environment.
Create space for connection. Allow plenty of time for coffee and refreshments on arrival and throughout the day. Encourage participants to network, perhaps meeting people they wouldn’t normally talk to. Get the speakers and special guests off their mobile devices and mingling with participants, acting as hosts and taking an interest in their world. They will know what is on their minds because you will have shared the results of your pre-search.
Design accessible slides and materials. Good PowerPoint design includes the use of large, easily readable fonts, with a maximum of five bullet points per slide, strong visual imagery and a colour palette that works for people with, for example, colour blindness. We once heard a speaker say, “You probably can’t read this from the back” – we couldn’t read it from the front! Not much of a visual aid then!
Rethink name badges. 12-point text isn’t helpful from distances over 30 centimetres and can lead to the accidental and potentially embarrassing invasion of personal space. Clever badges can help encourage conversations and networking, by also showcasing pastimes and recent achievements, for example. AI will design them for your participants.
Build in plenty of time for genuine interactivity, not tokenism. “Any questions quickly, before we move on?” won’t cut it. And don’t trade your interactive sessions for even more content and presentations. Prioritise fewer topics and deeper engagement over content overload.
Create psychologically safe ways to respond. Encourage small-group discussion before getting them to summarise their input and enter it for all to see on-screen, through platforms like Slido, Mentimeter, or a bespoke App. That democratises the process, especially if you get the entire audience to ‘like’ or ‘upvote’ their favourite ideas. Or you could set up challenges, from the stage, and ask table teams to think through their recommended solutions, and elect a spokesperson or reporter to share them back.
Keep the dialogue alive after the event. Some participants will naturally like to reflect on the event and will have brilliant ideas… the day after it finishes! It would be a shame to miss out on their insights, after all they will no doubt be carefully thought through. Make it easy for them to share.
How skilled facilitation fosters inclusion
Professional facilitation can make or break the success of a genuinely inclusive conference.
Striking a friendly, psychologically safe, tone is important from the outset. While an internal senior leader should welcome participants, an external facilitator often creates a more open environment.
As the name suggests, the facilitator’s role is to make things easy, for conference speakers, organisers, technical partners – and especially the participants.
After the all-important health and safety notices and housekeeping details, a good facilitator will address the ‘rules of engagement’. This ensures that no-one is in any doubt about how to get the best from the meeting, how to ensure every voice can be heard, and how to harness any tech being used.
Key to success is a call from the facilitator for active listening – ‘listening to understand, not listening to respond’. To quote Stephen Covey, ‘Seek first to understand and then be understood’.
And it should be made clear from the outset… mobiles off, tablets away, and laptops shut down, unless used for note-taking, or in extreme circumstances such as the imminent birth of a child! We jest, but you’ve scheduled plenty of breaks for participants to check their mail or call home.
Inclusive language helps drive engagement. So don’t just ask for questions! Ask for comments, observations, challenges, builds, and reflections too. This technique helps drive up participation – as well as questions. And give participants different ways of sharing their thoughts, perhaps via tech, anonymously if they prefer, table discussions and the good old hand up, physical or digital – but beware the ‘showboaters’ mentioned earlier.
Then professional facilitators can play to their strengths – leaving speakers to focus on their areas of expertise. Here are 15 skills that do not grow on facilitation trees!
1. Keeping the meeting on track
2. Creating an infectiously enthusiastic, but grounded atmosphere
3. Managing time expertly
4. Ensuring every voice is heard
5. Managing dominant contributors or unhelpful behaviours
6. Mastering interactive tech
7. Staying calm under pressure
8. Tackling biases head-on
9. Managing exercises
10. Moderating panel discussions
11. Making heroes of contributors from the ‘floor’
12. Helping speakers thrive
13. Summarising key points
14. Capturing actions
15. Setting up the call to action as the event comes to a close
Adding value long after your event ends
Your inclusive and inspiring event may have come to an end, but embedding the outcomes of the meeting has only just begun.
By now you’ve built a strong community of colleagues, and built a strong sense of belonging. Now you need to build on these foundations by keeping the conversations alive, post-event. This could involve:
- Thank-you messages from senior leaders
- Quotes from participants
- Candid communication of event evaluation forms
- Photos and video from the event
- Competitions that bring key messages to life
- Updates on action plans
- Profiles of key contributors, from the ‘top floor and shop floor’
- Quick wins – driven by your inclusive approach
Making inclusive events look effortless doesn’t have to be hard
Your next event is super important – to you, your senior colleagues, your participants, and through their actions, your stakeholders and customers too.
Putting on a truly inclusive event, that drives belonging with your organisation, doesn’t happen by accident. It requires careful consideration and clever creativity.
Ultimately, like every brilliant performance, no matter what the discipline, you want your event to look effortless and easy. But it doesn’t have to be hard work. In this blog, we’ve shared some of the business benefits, many of the perils and pitfalls and, most importantly, some tricks, tips, and techniques that we’ve found work. And there are plenty more where these came from.
Happy to help you deliver success
With more than 60 years’ combined experience in designing and facilitating inclusive employee engagement events, going beyond DEI to help create a sense of belonging too, Chris and Jiten have done the hard work, so you don’t have to. They are ideally placed to help you deliver success.
Factor in Axiom’s wider capabilities – from speaker coaching to event production and collaborative technologies – and together we can form a powerful partnership.
If you would like a no-obligation conversation about how we can support your next event, simply reach out via our contact form or call Chris directly on +44 (0) 33 3088 3088
