How to host an online event effectively?

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When teams are working from home or scattered at various distances, Video meetings, one-on-one chats and online groups are great ways to stay connected with each other. Online meetings and video calls are no hidden secrets, but how do you organise an online event effectively?

Below are a few tips which will help you host an online event effectively.

Plan in advance about the event

You need to plan ahead about the theme of the event. What is the purpose of the event and what will be the benefits you and the audience will benefit from this event? Finding answers for these questions is necessary to get everybody putting it together and participating. And it will help you design an event that will give participants greater insight into your topic or product demonstration. The event which is purposeful, meaningful and specific will draw attention and attract registrations.

Identify the audience and the right medium to engage.

An online event can be organised using various platforms. Online webinars, live demos using screen sharing or Q&A through various e-learning apps are few of the platforms that will allow meaningful opportunities for your audience to learn and engage. Considering the strength of the audience, you can decide which platform would be effective. Live-streaming is a great way to engage an audience of any size. Adding Q&A session in between the live presentations will engage the audience more. You can even record your video in advance, make an interactive ppt and display them in the webinar, while you talk with the audience and engage them with QnA. Animated presentations always attract. It is a fun way to engage and educate your audience while keeping your budget in check.

Online events are cost-effective, time-saving and more return-oriented.

Unlike the traditional way where you would plan months before to invest lakhs of money to host an event, you could actually plan and host an event within a couple of days. Online events help people retain information and give you a chance to build community. It provides various interactive ways to engage people.

The speaker of the event should be a great presenter with a soothing but clearly audible voice to keep the ears connected till the end of the event.

Online events should not be lengthy

Audiences generally tend to lose attention after roughly 10 minutes of hearing from the same presenter or listening/reading to straight content. Avoid making lengthy events. Break up the event with quizzes, polls and QnAs activities to engage the audience. Allow attendees to ask you questions.

Enable an online friend to help with technical difficulties during the event

While the speaker is presenting, enable an online friend who will look into the technical issues like screen sharing, sound, login, logout and network issues. Answer to the questions that arise in chat. So that the speaker doesn’t get disturbed and finishes the presentation on time.

Last but not the least, Make sure meetings have a clear goal and agenda, and pre-reads are set out in advance.

Creative Social Intranet Software is one such engaging platform which enables online polls, QnAs, video streaming, chat and more to a group of communities.

5 tips to stay fit in quarantine

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COVID-19 cases emerging daily, staying at home in self-quarantine is requested by the Government. Public parks and fitness centres where individuals are normally active are also temporarily closed. This is a significant challenge for us to remain physically active, with prolonged lockdown period. If you continue with sedentary behaviour and low levels of physical activity, it can have negative effects on the health, well-being and quality of life. Staying at home in self-quarantine can also cause additional stress and challenge the mental health of individuals.

Creative shares a few tips and techniques that can be a valuable tool to help you remain calm and continue to protect your health during this time.

Tip No. 1:

Eat Clean:

When there is less availability of ready to eat food resources, take advantage of it. Drink enough water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages. Limit or avoid alcoholic beverages for adults and strictly avoid these in young people, and pregnant and breastfeeding women, or for other health reasons. Ensure plenty of fruits and vegetables, and limit the intake of salt, sugar and fat. Prefer whole grains rather than refined foods. Sugary foods will result in an excess of carbohydrates.
It is important for individuals to get a balanced mix of all three macronutrient groups – carbohydrates, fats and proteins because each serves important purposes in the body. Keep your mind and body fueled and optimised with clean and nutritious food.

Tip No. 2:

Stay fit:

As per WHO health recommendations, an average human should have 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week or a combination of both. One can achieve this even at home, with no special equipment and with limited space.

Follow simple rules and stay active and reduce sedentary behaviour while at home in self-quarantine:

  • Short active breaks from routine: This may include playing with kids, dancing, or performing domestic chores like cleaning the house, washing utensils or gardening.
  • Follow the online exercise class: Everyone has a smartphone. Connect it with your TV or just play on your phone, follow online Zumba, aerobics, dance, yoga, fitness classes on Youtube.
  • Walk when you talk: Even in small spaces, walking around or walking on the spot, can help you remain active. If you have a call, stand or walk around your home while you speak.
  • Stand up: Reduce your sedentary time by standing up whenever possible. Ideally, aim to interrupt sitting and reclining time every 30 minutes.
  • Relax: Meditation and deep breaths can help you remain calm. Doing Yoga on a daily basis proves very effective wrt to health and mental relaxation.

Tip No. 3:

Train Your Brain:
Your brain has the ability to learn and grow as you age — a process called brain plasticity — but for it to do so, you have to train it on a regular basis. Use this self-quarantine period to develop new skills within you. Read more books, play mental games, challenge yourself cooking some food recipe, explore new interest and keep yourself engaged in it. Start with small actions and do them repeatedly to train your brain and make it a habit.

Tip No. 4:

Get Some Rest:
Muscles store carbohydrates in the form of glycogen. During exercise, your body breaks down glycogen to fuel your workout. Rest gives your body time to replenish these energy stores before your next workout. You had been really working hard and running all day. Its time to give some rest to your body so that you come out the way you never had before.

Tip No. 5:

Stay Connected:
Talking with friends, colleagues, relatives on a video call, phone and text messages will help you keep engaged and help develop empathy in each other. Support the community and achieve a sense of nirvana. We are all in this together.

How to use onboarding data to predict employee performance

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Onboarding employees is a huge task. You only get one opportunity to make a good first impression and help set your new employee’s choice to join your organization.
It’s difficult to have everything in order for day one when new hires are coming to your office, but what if they’re all starting from their own workplace?
For companies that operate with a fully remote workforce or the various who embrace remote hiring in addition to offices, onboarding employees becomes even tougher. Not only do you need to make sure they’re set up logistically from afar, but you need to make sure that they start to feel part of the team without meeting in person.
With 800 employees working remotely from more than 28 countries, Creative Social Intranet is no stranger to remote employee onboarding.
There’s a different kind of rapport and belonging created on a team of remote people. How onboarding plays out is an important role in setting up their first success, and as Creative Social Intranet learned their employees’ long-term presentation of work.

The role of employee feedback at a remote organization

In any organization, employee surveys are the start of the conversation with your people. They will not replace in-person conversations, but in an organization where employees are spread out across the world, they become an even more essential part of driving people-based decisions.
We take what is often implicitly understood in an in-person environment, and makes it directly available to us remotely. While we can’t depend on luck to connect with each other or understand what’s going across the organization, we can deliberately design opportunities to truly see and hear each other—and our employee feedback platform is an important way in which we do that.
At Creative Social Intranet, we talk about the task of collect, understand and act when it comes to employee feedback. Helping us understand those data points and how they work together is the job of a high-performing platform.
Then, we can take action where it’s required and most effective.
At a faraway organization, when employees know they have more than one medium through which to provide feedback, and they see action being taken because of their feedback, they’re more apt to buy into the system, creating a trustworthy cycle.

Knowing when employee performance is at risk

At Creative Social Intranet, the HR team wanted to know how the Onboarding program influence employee’s performance later on. With this knowledge, we could then take action to drive vast levels of success earlier in the employee journey.
Using Performance and Engagement, Creative Social Intranet was able to access special insights.

By connecting the employee onboarding data with the performance data, we found three key risk factors:

1. Are employees feeling productive?

New hires who reacted favourably to the onboarding survey question, “I am feeling productive” were 4.2 times more likely to be high performing (vs. low performing) at their 1-year mark.
Creative Social Intranet’s one of the members recalls having a conversation with a new hire who had mentioned not feeling productive in her first few weeks. While generally an action item to follow up on, the new insights from the employee feedback programme expanded the need to address it fast. The member knew that setting up a meeting with them to get to know the ways to capture quick wins could help enhance employee involvement and speed up the likelihood of employee’s success at Creative Social Intranet.

2. Is employee induction thorough and effectual?

New hires who responded favourably to the question, “My induction program was thorough and successful,” are 3.8 times more likely to be high performing (vs. low performing) at their 1-year mark. Onboarding at Creative Social Intranet is a week-long program designed to give new hires a solid foundation on an organization’s culture, community, faraway life, and design. New hires are welcomed as whole human beings and are invited to break through the screen as their most authentic selves.
We get out of training what we put into it. In order to get a lot out of training, we have to be fully mixed up and committed. If we are disengaged, that carries through to our success over time. We want to make sure we understand when and where new hires aren’t connecting well with the training methods the onboarding survey helps us do that.”

3. Does the new hire’s experience keep up to their expectations?

New hires who responded favourably to the question, “My experience of the organization has matched my expectations” are 3.1 times more likely to be high performing at their 1-year mark.

Working far away can sometimes look like the only option – you can work from anywhere, likely have flexible hours, and you lose the commute! However, there are real problems that can come along with faraway working, and it’s not the correct fit for everybody. After seeing unexpected levels of turnover 6-12 months in, Creative Social Intranet needed to check data from this survey question and others highlighted that there was a not a match between expectations and reality (i.e., that faraway life can sometimes feel not connected and isolating). We’ve since clarified employees’ hiring messaging to provide a more realistic preview of faraway life.

The value of connecting performance and engagement data

Collecting, understanding, and acting on employee feedback is not a “one-and-done” initiative. At Creative Social Intranet, we know there will be more insights to come from our engagement and work data.
We are sure that we will find that there are more examples of these unfavourable moments along the employee journey. Where we can see how putting efforts into changing something that’s really special for each team member has a really huge payoff. That’s what we are really looking forward to diving into next.

Is Coronavirus fear disconnecting your workforce?

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Achieve a Higher level of Employee Engagement with Creative Social Intranet


The outbreak of Coronavirus has led to a slowdown of various giant organisations and their routine operations. As the coronavirus epidemic widens, Public health officials have recommended corporates to allow people to work from home.
Although the COVID-19 coronavirus causes flu-like symptoms, it’s not a flu virus. The fact that there is no vaccine or antiviral treatment currently available to fight the disease and so people have to rely on more basic strategies to reduce the risk of the infection. Those strategies include avoiding opportunities for the virus to spread through direct contact with people who have an infection.
As the outbreak of the virus has vulnerable effects in various countries, Disease Control and Prevention Centres are also urging to have strategies ready to protect the workforce and their operations. It should be ensured that everyone has the necessary tools to work from home and have outside-of-work contact information on hand. Many companies have mentioned the deep cleaning of office spaces and self-quarantining. Face to face job interviews have been banned by some firms, in favour, interviews were conducted by teleconference.
To reduce contact, several tech companies- including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have already called off or postponed events, withdrawn from conferences and non-essential travel.
Twitter is also urging its 5000 global staff to work from home. Brain Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform coin base, made a similar announcement of asking a few of their employees to start work from home. As such work from home is not a complete solution but it may help in slowing down the spreading of the infection, he added.

So what can be the ultimate solution to this?

Creative Social Intranet is the answer. Creative Social Intranet is an online portal which enables employees of an organisation to access data, their talents and share experiences on a single click. Creative Social Intranet is a modern way of Corporate Digital Workplace which improves workplace engagement via communication and collaboration. Here, employees can submit their work report, projects, share innovative ideas etc and henceforth get rewarding and recognitions from their seniors and colleagues. Recognised and rewarded employees are more likely to work even more efficiently for the company.

How can you lead the workforce even when they are working from home?

Increase your employee enthusiasm and engagement using Creative Social Intranet.

This digital workplace environment can be accessed easily from any device and from any location. It carries all the business services and collaborative tools which employees need in their day to day core dealings. It basically focuses on the use of technology so as the employees perform to their full potential without even wanting to be mobile from one place to another.
The traditional way of working has undergone numerous changes. The human aspect is now being replaced with advanced technology. It has a fact attached to it, the modern way of the intranet has led to increasing business productivity by 75% higher.

What benefits does Digital Workplace give?
  • Boost productivity
  • Improve collaboration
  • Cut workspace costs
  • Harmonize workflow
  • Improve employee satisfaction

Today, how often do companies think of people strategy? Just rewarding for the work done is not the only way to keep your employees motivated. This requires Employee Engagement tactics as well. Employee Engagement is one of the vital processes which any organisation needs to follow, so as to keep the workforce involved and productive in their esteem work.
Creative Social Intranet Software helps in boosting employee engagement as well. Today many companies have started leveraging intranet software to boost employee engagement and modify their strategies accordingly. Eventually, it also helps in verifying, measuring and monitoring which strategy succeeds and which one fails.

Features which it poses:

  • Employee Directory
  • Company Departments/ Groups
  • Task Desk /Work Report
  • Meeting room booking
  • Post Current Vacancies
  • Announcement board & Internal Newsletter
  • Employee Onboarding

    and much more.

    All the daily operations which require human contact can easily be avoided through the Creative Social Intranet digital portal. So at this verge of coronavirus epidemic emergency, it’s quite favourable to opt digital workplace for the companies worldwide. By this way, the employees stay connected and interactive enough about their work and job which they perform.

    Why is Creative Social Intranet beneficial?
    1. Increases Efficiency
    2. Doubles Productivity
    3. Enables Collaboration
    4. Boost Employee Satisfaction

    Every organisation defers in their preferences based on the requirement of the business. Creative Social Intranet is the only portal which facilitates and builds the websites which reflect the ideas, likings and goals of the clients. Its creative designs and customized look and feel attracts the flow of new clients.
    The prime objective of Creative Social Intranet is to reach all small and big organisations as well, across the globe. Social Intranet can be used by all kinds of companies small, medium and large-scale enterprises. In a way to transform the traditional intranet workings for better efficiency and productivity. As such Creative Social Intranet’s IT solutions are the best way to help clients to achieve their end targets to increase customer base and profit margins.