Corporate Event Ideas For 2023: Virtual And Hybrid Events

‘Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities, seize the common occasions and make them great.’

We are beginning this blog in a poetic way since making the most of the situation has become the only saving grace in this pandemic. 

Just when we all thought normalcy was returning, another catastrophic wave hit us again and changed everyone’s plans across the sectors, including the event industry. 

However, technology has proven to be the best friend and most helpful marketing asset every event professional requires. Since social distancing has become the need of the hour, corporate houses also have begun to take the virtual route for hosting corporate events and keeping in touch with their employees. 

It is not all easy as it seems, though! Virtual corporate events require rigorous planning and execution to avoid seeing their attendees yawning and go through screen fatigue in between the event. 

Make your way to the end of this post, as we have compiled a few unique corporate event ideas along with some virtual event engagement ideas that would keep your audience engaged and glued to the end of your event! 

Ideas To Make Your Virtual Corporate Event Fun & Interesting 

1. Virtual Live Concert

The phrase – ‘Nothing heals better than music’, is rightly said and gave rise to the live music industry which unfortunately suffered the worst hit due to the pandemic. 

However, virtual live concerts have picked up the pace and taken the world by storm, especially over the past two years. 

You can bring a live show to your employees and they can enjoy watching it from the comfort of their homes. Using an appropriate platform, you can live stream an artist or band performing from sites like YouTube, Facebook Live, etc. 

2. Virtual Gaming Night 

Enhance organization activities and the competitive streak within your employees with gamification. Hosting a virtual gaming session can inspire your employees to engage, share and collaborate with one another. Moreover, it helps in breaking the ice and pushes them to communicate.

For the virtual gaming night, you can conduct games like team trivia, a round of work bingo, virtual UNO, or even multiplayer games like call of duty. 

3. Virtual Training Events 

Corporate companies usually spend a lot of money to send their employees for training to other places. It involves quite an expenditure as it includes their travel and stay.

Virtual training events have proven to be a boon as it has not only cut down on expenses but also keep the employees motivated in these depressing times. You can collaborate with an instructor who can give your employees live training sessions that would result in an increase in their confidence level and overall work productivity. 

4. Virtual Team Building Activities 

Quite often the employees are unable to take out time from their work routine to interact with their fellow colleagues which creates an unnecessary void between them. While everyone is working from home, communication plays an important role to bind them together. 

You can host a team-building session comprising a few activities that makes them work in a group and function as a team. The activities can be a mix to check their mental, emotional and physical quotients. This will also work to refresh the minds of your employees and make them more alert and efficient. 

5. Virtual Wine & Cheese Tasting 

We are certain that you already must be envisioning barrel-filled tasting rooms and vineyards in your head, but all this can happen virtually too! 

Invite famous winemakers to give sessions and explain the subtle art of winemaking. A regular wine tasting event lets attendees visit vineyards and try out new wine flavors. Instead, you can collaborate and live stream the videos from the tasting room directly. 

Additionally, you can send across the bottle of wine to your attendees much before the virtual event and ask them to detect its flavor, taste notes, and aroma. 

You can ask every attendee to go one by one and raise a toast before sipping for more impact. And of course, some french cheese and wine would be one classic combination that all will love! Don’t you agree?

6. Virtual Awards Gala

If you were hoping to host an award gala night, you need not cancel it as it can happen virtually! All employees look forward to the virtual award ceremony and want to experience the adrenaline rush before the host declares the winner’s name. 

When you have the right tools and platform, hosting a virtual award night is bound to be a success. Just motivate your employees and staff members to suit up and pick their best outfits to look fancy and have some fun. 

After all, recognizing the top performers can instill a sense of loyalty amongst employees and makes them feel valued. 

7. Virtual Scavenger Hunt

One of the best ideas to host a virtual event is to host a scavenger hunt, and yes, it can be hosted online as well! We love it and highly recommend it to ensure maximum participation from your employees.

Scavenger hunts are great fun, and apart from being memorable, they work well for instilling team-building skills. Ask the host of the game to tell all participants to fetch an item at a time from their house. It could be a jar of pickles, a dusting broom, or even a sanitizer! The first one to return to their seat gets the point. 

8. Virtual Pajama Night 

Employees love working from home in their pajamas as it is their most comfortable outfit. 

Refresh and make them feel alive after a tiresome day by organizing a fun virtual pajama party. Ask all your employees to attend the event in their favorite pair of pajamas.

You can add more fun to your corporate event by asking the attendees to design or customize their pajamas by switching on their creative side. Surprise the most creative employee with a gift card or voucher. 

Additionally, you can continue the night by streaming a movie on Netflix and asking the audience to binge on their favorite munchies and relax! 

Ideas To Keep Your Corporate Event Audience Hooked 

Now that you know about the different ideas that can be used for planning your legit corporate event, here’s how you can ensure maximum engagement from your audience. 

1. Set Up Virtual Selfie Photo Booth

Selfies and clicking pictures are the highlight of any event, be it virtual or regular. While setting up photo stands and selfie booths in regular events is quite easy, there are various platforms online that enable hosts to create innovative photo booths.

What’s more? You can personalize the virtual photo booth by adding colors or themes to it. You can even include the logo of your company for the employees to resonate with it better. The attendees can then post the photos or selfies on their social media handles using your event hashtag. 

2. Display Social Wall

Another sure shot way to ensure maximum engagement and participation from the virtual attendees is to include a social wall during the event. If you are alien to what it is, a social wall displays content, be it user-generated or branded from the connection type selected by you. It can be from hashtags, mentions, tags, etc. 

You can aggregate and display the content posted by your attendees on their social media handles using a responsive tool like the Taggbox Display. The tool helps the users create highly engaging social media walls by fetching content from over 15+ social media platforms. 

Taggbox Display comes with a plethora of customization options for the users to add their personal touch to the social media wall. Other features include a content moderation panel, advanced analytics for tracking its performance, and a robust back support team for 24×7 assistance. 

The newly launched Taggbox Display Studio can be used by you to add infotainment apps to get your attendees engaged and informed at the same time. 

In a nutshell, everyone loves getting featured, and displaying employee-generated content would push the other attendees to also participate! 

3. Create Engaging Quizzes

It is quite common for the attendees to simultaneously browse on other sources while attending the event, especially when they find the session boring. Fun and engaging quizzes can be a breather for your attendees after every session. 

Be it an informative quiz or a Hollywood trivia quiz, and they hold the potential to transform the overall experience and vibe of the corporate social event and make it more lively. Offer exciting prizes and vouchers for the winners to engage them more. 

4. Enable Live Chats 

While there may be a few virtual attendees who are outright and do not hesitate from interacting, there may be a few who are shy and apprehensive about expressing their thoughts.

Make all the attendees feel comfortable by enabling live chats through the event for them to be able to open up throughout the event. You can keep the comments anonymous for more entries. The speaker can attend to the queries in a particular serial. 

5. Organize Live Polls 

How do you get to know if your corporate event lacks something midway? Through live polling! constructive feedback from your audience can keep your virtual corporate event going successfully.

Make sure you organize live polls and ask questions about the speed and pitch of the speaker, the clarity of the event, and how likely they are to attend your next event!

Let’s Call It A Wrap 

Staying connected with your employees in these tough times is important to make them feel important and, most importantly, cared for. And a virtual event can help you attain that. 

We are at the end of this post, and we are sure you must have enjoyed going through these corporate event ideas as much as we did while compiling them for you! 

And remember, it is not just about generating ideas. It is about making ideas happen in your next virtual corporate event.

Go on now, prepare for your next virtual event but before that, mask up, sanitize and take care!