Sergey Tokarev about how to hold team meetings in wartime
Many Ukrainian HR companies are thinking about how to keep their employees together despite them being located all over the world. The Roosh company headed by Sergey Tokarev kept up with the times and organized a corporate meeting right in the metaverse.
In December 2021, Roosh still had the opportunity to gather the entire team in one place and have a real meeting. They went to “Cinema Planet” for a Synchro Day meeting, where they discussed the results of a six-month work. According to Olexandra Borodina, the Roosh creative communications director, typical reports in conference rooms are too boring, so the idea of a non-classical meeting was welcomed.
Unfortunately, in 2022, all employees ended up in different parts of Ukraine, and some even abroad, but the need for meetings didnāt disappear. Therefore, Synchro Day was moved to the modern level on the platform of the metaverse.
Party Space has managed to become a platform where employees feel like they are in a real meeting with speakers and presentations. Everyone has an opportunity to move around the hall and do all the same actions as in an office conference room.
In the summer of 2022, the company of Sergey Tokarev Roosh turned two years old and the team decided to hold a festive event on the Gather platform. Unlike Party Space, everything here is more entertaining and interactive. Here the team ābuiltā a ship, in honor of their first corporate party, which was held on a real yacht. The virtual ship practically did not differ from the real one, all the same, with several floors and entertainment and recreation areas.
Participation in Gather costs $3, but there was a discount for Roosh, and the company paid $2.1 for each participant.
Preparing for the event
The Metaverse Platform is not just a call rally program. All participants of the event received guides in advance and also had half an hour to adapt to the platform. This is essentially a virtual world where you need to learn how to move and do different actions.
Each speaker also had a rehearsal and a little training on how to properly handle everything in space, so that there would be no embarrassment and all participants would feel comfortable.
It took a bit of creativity to get into Gather. It was necessary to create an avatar: dress it up, make a hairstyle and choose the appropriate accessories.
Corporate design
The Gather platform makes it possible to choose different halls for events. They can be decorated to your heart’s content by adding various paintings, project renderings, and logos. You can also use adjacent rooms. This is what Sergey Tokarev’s Roosh company did by organizing an exhibition of projects there.
The main part
To keep the attention of the team at the event, it was necessary to organize something exciting. To do this, the team divided the event into four parts, each with different activities.
So the first were the speeches of the speakers so as not to immediately move away from offline meetings.
Then, there was an entertaining quiz with different types of tasks.
After brainstorming, time was allocated for a charity auction. As a result, 300,000 UAH were collected, which were redirected to Ukrainian charity funds.
The final event of the corporate party was the performance of the Ukrainian stand-up artist Vasyl Baydak, for whom entering the metaverse became a separate quest.
Also, for the corporate party, the team selected two leaders, and each of them got a script. On such a platform, the presenter had to perform not only an entertaining function during moments of awkward pauses or when someone loses the Internet connection but also be an assistant at the time to help employees adapt to the platform.
As this experience has shown, meeting as a team can be great even if the whole team is scattered around the world, and modern technologies contribute to this.
