Introduction

Hello everyone. I am Mori from the Tech Blog Team, now the Technical Public Relations Group. Starting this April, we’ve rebranded our team as the ‘Technical Public Relations Group’ ✨ Thank you for your ongoing support‍ ️🙇‍♀️
I’ve covered my other projects in separate articles. If you’re interested, please feel free to check them out 👀

• Compliance with GDPR in the Global KINTO
• GDPR compliance: Implementing a Cookie Consent Pop-up on a Global Website

Getting Started

On January 31, 2024, KINTO Technologies (KTC) held its first company-wide offline gathering as a 2024 kick off 🎉 We handled every aspect of this event bottom-up from start to finish. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we put together this large-scale meeting. I’m aiming to document this for future reference, but I also hope it also serves as a helpful guide for anyone tasked with organizing an in-house event.
I should have published this earlier this year, but due to my slower writing pace, it’s coming out about six months late. Sorry about that 🙇‍♀️ (I know timeliness is crucial for event management articles... 😭)

Why we decided to organize the event

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of employees increased dramatically, and we now have about 350 employees. At this scale, it is difficult to create a sense of connection and unity, and there were more calls for offline and team-building events than before. In addition, since there are not many opportunities to send messages from top management, it took time for the overall vision to spread. Given these challenges, three team members who frequently handle event management started planning, noting, ‘Since it’s post-COVID-19, an opportunity for all employees to gather might help improve these issues a bit.’ This was early November last year.

First, the outline

Since it was decided to be held in January, there was only three months for us three until the implementation, so the schedule was quite tight. We decided to create a rough schedule as follows:

First of all, in order to gain approval for holding the event itself, we considered the outline of the project as below:
Event Purpose

• 2023 recap and kick off 2024.
• Share the company-wide vision and encourage cross-departmental communication to foster unity within the organization.
  Event Agenda
• Expanded version of the monthly All-Employee Meeting (Development Organization Headquarters All-Hands)
• Online participation possible for the first half (within work hours)
• Offline-only social gathering (outside of work hours)

Content

Category	Time	Contents	Note
Rehearsal	15:00-16:00	Venue Setup/Rehearsal	Sound preparation and coordination, etc
	16:00 ​-16:30 Admission to Reception process ​	Attendee Reception
Main Part	16:30-16:35 ​	Opening
	16:35 ​-16:40 ​ ​	Looking Back on 2023(Vice President)	Review of 2023 and the Outlook for 2024
	16:40-17:30 ​ ​	2023 Kanji of the Year	Was also held at the end of 2022. Review of each group
	17:30 ​-17:40 ​	Break/Preparing for Presentations​​
	17:40-18:35 ​	K-1 Grand Prix ​​​	Each division presents their 2023 highlight project and awards will be given to the best presentations!
	18:35 ​-18:45 ​	​Break​​​​
	18:45-19:00	K-1 Grand Prix Result Announcement ​​​​​	Awards and Comments from the Winners
	19:00 ​-19:05 ​	Summary(President)	2023 Summary and prospects for 2024
Reception	19:05-19:20	Take Pictures/ Break/ Room Layout Change
	19:20 ​-20:50 ​	Social Gathering​	Toast & Kagami biraki (ceremonial opening of a sake barrel) ・ Company-wide interaction, mini games included! ​
	20:50-21:00	Cleanup​​​ ​	21:00 Leave

Engage Every Team!

Since the outline had been decided, we announced it internally in order to get an idea of total number of employees who would be willing to attend. Typically, in-house events are announced to the entire company via Slack, but this is a company-wide event. As such, it requires collaboration from every group to succeed️🤦‍♀️
So, we asked each group to designate a person to coordinate the rest of the teams. Having one contact person per group allowed us to gather responses more efficiently, avoiding the need for repeated announcements from management. This approach enabled us to collect responses smoothly and within the deadline. Thank you very much to everyone in charge of the groups! We really appreciated your support😭❤️

the announcement in my department

More offline participation than expected!

Since this event was set up as a Development Organization Headquarters meeting, that is, a meeting of all employees, everyone was essentially required to participate. We expected to have people who would inevitably participate online due to family reasons or business trips, but even so, we needed a venue with a capacity of 300 people.
We struggled to find a venue near our office, but after a series of searches and repeated calls, we were able to miraculously book the "Kanda Square Hall", just a 5-minute walk from our Jimbocho office.

A very beautiful venue. Thank you, Kanda Square.

Due to the unavoidable online participation and the need for an English interpretation channel (described later), we decided to stream the All-Employee Meeting part of the event as an online webinar. Thank you very much 😭❤️ to everyone in charge of the broadcast.️

Each role performed its tasks simultaneously!

When organizing an event, we typically divide the support team into smaller teams and assign tasks to each. The great thing about our KINTO Technologies is that once teams are assigned a task, they are self-directed and proactive in their approach! It was very helpful because they took initiative and openly shared their opinions. For this event, several of the previously mentioned group representatives were assigned to multiple roles.

Role	Task Details
Overall Coordinators	Colleagues in charge of overall coordination and providing advice to other groups in charge when needed.
Moderators	In charge of facilitating and energizing the entire event (the most crucial role!)
Reception	Team reviewing effective crowd management strategies, guiding attendees around the venue, and coordinating the information to be displayed throughout the event.
Interpretation Coordinators	Team managing communication with external English interpreters for our international team members.
Kanji of the Year team	Gathering all proposals from each group for a kanji representing the year 2023 to be presented at our ‘Kanji of the Year’ segment.
K-1 Grand Prix team	Helping gather the information and slides about the projects that will be presented per department.
Summary of President and Vice President's greetings	Team creating the slides of the President and Vice President messages together with the purpose of the event.
Social Gathering	Team coordinating the catering and what activities to do at the social gathering.
Novelties	Team creating the novelty items and giveaways that will be distributed to everyone.

Moderators

This time, we enlisted three experienced moderators to be our presenters and energize the event. I’ll share more details about how the event went in a future article. According to the agenda, they divided and assigned themselves the segments they would cover, determined the slides needed for each segment, and planned how to engage and get everyone excited. Although we only had a rough schedule, they identified key concerns for moderating, created their own scripts, and more. They took on many tasks independently, even though we didn’t explicitly ask for them. I was truly impressed 😭❤️

List of points of concern

Moderator’s script

Reception

Even though it’s an internal event, efficient reception is crucial when dealing with such a large number of people. Five team members volunteered as the main receptionists, (and even more assisted us on the day of the event!!) At a reception, smooth guidance is key! I believe it determines the first impression of an event. The longer attendees have to wait to be checked in, the more frustrated they may become with the overall experience. In this case, we improved the process by involving the attendees on their own check-in as much as possible, rather than just the reception staff marking 〇 or X manually or handing out the event swags. We implemented the following

flow for its process:

By creating in advance a layout with different tables to ensure a quick flow, we were able to guide them to the venue very smoothly without creating crowds of people blocking the reception and entrance. However, we regretted that the guidance to arrive to the venue was not very thorough. We've taken notes to improve that the next time📝

Interpretation Coordinators

KTC has a lot of international team members, many of whom are more proficient in English than Japanese. Since this event would include key topics from management, we decided to have interpreters for the main segments. Performing simultaneous interpreting for two and a half hours worth of content is far beyond what an amateur could manage 🤦‍♀️ So we decided to enlist the help of a professional interpretation company that has long supported our orientations for this event as well.
🔻By enabling the Language Interpretation feature on Zoom, attendees can switch audio channels to hear the translated audio or the original version at will🔻

The interpreter listens to Japanese 👂 and speaks simultaneously in English 🗣️ on the English channel, so that the English channel broadcasts the English audio. You can learn how to set it up here 👉Language Interpretation in meetings or webinars
The coordinators maintained constant communication with the off-site interpreters via a separate channel to ensure there were no audio or video issues. Thanks to the interpreters, the management’s message was accurately conveyed to everyone. I can’t speak highly enough of professional interpreters and their skill️🙇‍♀️

2023 Kanji of the Year

We also presented this segment in 2022. Managers from each group would take the stage to present the kanji representing the year, summarize their group’s highlights, and share their outlook for the upcoming year. We asked the person in charge to compile the answers of the 22 groups in advance and reflect them in the presentation deck.
Given the managers' busy schedules, we notified them in mid-December and set the deadline for January 19.

🔻This is from the former Tech Blog Team (currently the Technical Public Relations Group).

🔺 We asked everyone to summarized the contents of each group in Confluence and incorporate it into the materials like this!🔻

It was interesting to see the colors of each group, and it was a rare opportunity to get to know what each group was doing and what they will do!

K-1 Grand Prix team

The highlight of this event to say the least. Every month, we give awards to outstanding projects and activities under the name of the "Kageyama Award"👉 Reference article: How We Bolstered All-Employee Meetings

The purpose is to do a look back into our most highlighted initiatives, recognize the value of the work being done, and to share information across departments. For the annual award version, we decided to call it the K-1 Grand Prix.
The general flow is shown in the figure below:

We don’t make presentations for the monthly awards, but we did request them for this annual event. Presentation skills are also tested. Given the large number of groups, we asked each to submit a project and then selected one highlight project from each group.
I participated in the Platform Division selection, and it was impressive to see a lively environment where team members from different groups could come together and praise each other.
During the announcement of the qualifying rounds and throughout the event, we emphasized that the goal of the K-1GP is not to declare the best or worst but to celebrate all contributions. Of course, the underlying premise is that all the work everyone has done over the past year is excellent. The main purpose of the K-1GP was to reflect on our work and applaud each other's efforts, so at least in the qualifying rounds of the Platform Division I participated in, I was very happy to see this environment of praising each other.
Projects selected in the qualifying rounds were required to prepare three-minute presentations during the week leading up to the meeting. It was a very tight schedule, and I am grateful to all the presenters🙇‍♀️‍ All the presentation materials we received were full of individuality, and I looked forward to seeing the new submissions each day. lol

Greetings from the President and Vice President

The messages from our President Kotera-san and Vice President Kageyama-san were also key parts of our agenda. This segment was very important because we rarely have opportunities to hear directly from them in our monthly general meetings. Specifically from Kotera-san, whom we typically only hear from at KINTO/KTC joint meetings. I believe that hearing a clear message from upper management helps align everyone’s efforts toward a common goal. Like providing a solid foundation. The organizing team discussed in advance our vision for KTC engineers, our goals for KTC in 2024, and what we wanted to hear from upper management. We then summarized these points into an overall structure for their review and revision.
To make the slides easier to convey, our designers from the Creative Office helped us. They choose words that would not be misunderstood by our international members and complemented them with visuals.

Visualizing the President’s Message

This time, Toyota's new vision (Inventing our path forward together) was announced in a timely manner, and was also shared again by the President.

Inventing our path forward together

Social Gathering

The best part of offline events is the opportunity for socializing. This time, we were able to customize the hamburgers with our logo through our catering services, making them look very upscale ✨

Catering was set up in the foyer, and nothing was placed in the main venue, which made it a bit inconvenient to walk back and forth for food and drinks.
We made a toast during the ‘kagami biraki’ ceremony. Since it was the first time for all of us organizers to prepare a kagami biraki, we did a lot of research and became a bit anxious upon reading that we needed a crowbar and a large cutter. However, we discovered a very convenient and unique barrel on the KURAND^[1] website that didn’t require any special tools, so we decided to order that one.

Isn't it so cute?? This design was also created by of our Creative Office 💯
After the toast, everyone was basically free to eat and drink, but we are talking about 260 people. As organizers, our goal was make this an opportunity for people who don’t usually interact to engage in conversation. We looked at what we could do to get the conversations started. Should we start with playing games in teams? We were worried that there were too many people, and we didn't want to force participation... On our search for a good method to spark conversations, we discovered Rally: a service that helps you create stamp rallies easily with your smartphone. Rally can scan QR codes to mark virtual stamps in its app. By distributing QR codes by department and encouraging everyone to collect stamps from all departments, we could facilitate interaction among participants! It was a quick decision. We could customize the design extensively even with the free plan, and we were able to have it ready in a week.
🔻Our instructions to use Rally

We affixed QR code stickers to the ID cases distributed per departments at the reception, allowing people to scan them and collect the virtual stamps on their smartphones.
It was excellent in terms of ease of preparation and as a tool for communication. Overall, it worked very well. It was moving to see people from different departments talking to each other smoothly without feeling forced.

Poster displayed on the day

Novelties

Another important preparation not to be forgotten is the novelty items. Due to the tight schedule, we couldn’t find what we needed at first, and the Creative Office made a lot of things for us.

K-1 GP logo	Certificate of Recognition

Slide Master	Barrel design for the Kagami biraki

ID card case (distributed to everyone)	Staff T-shirt

Tumbler (stamp rally giveaway, for those who collected all stamps)	Tote bag (stamp rally giveaway, for those who collected all stamps)

Even when I look at it again now I want to say “How much more are we making them make stuff, poor guys!” haha Additionally, our in-house engineers developed a tool to automate the creation of everyone’s name tags.

🔻The Slack icon, department, name, and KTC logo printed for everyone.

I casually mentioned, ‘It would be nice to have something like that,’ and they created it right away.
I’m always impressed by the speed and quality of our colleagues' work. Once again, I’d like to express my deep appreciation to everyone who helped us out, despite their other responsibilities. 🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️

What I learned, and going forward

It’s been six months now, but looking back at what I wrote, I’m still impressed by how much preparation went into it... lol
Reflecting on this article, I’m reminded of the importance of clearly communicating the organization’s vision and goals to the entire company and conducting effective team-building offline. By management communicating their vision and strategy directly, we can work toward the same goal on a daily basis, based on their thoughts and directions. Additionally, successfully helping people connect with these key ideas can also boost employee motivation. By addressing this offline, the direction will be more easily absorbed, helping to build trust between employees and management. It will also help in addressing questions and concerns among employees. It has been five years since the KINTO service started, and as a company, we are in the midst to our next stage. I realized that holding such an event at this time would lead to increased engagement and fostering a sense of unity throughout our organization ✨
We can share the results of the event in other articles, but there were many positive responses from participants, such as ‘I feel more motivated to work’, ‘I gained a better understanding of what other teams are doing’, or ‘I learned more about upper management’s perspectives’ 😄
We aim to make this event an annual tradition, using what we’ve learned from this year's operation to make further improvements for the next one💪
And here I am, having written almost 7,000 words before I knew it. That’s how you can see how attached I was to this event. Thank you for reading until the end! KINTO Technologies is planning a variety of events, both internally and externally, in the future! We are always posting our external events at Connpass, so please join us if you are interested 😄

脚注

1. Later, we collaborated with KURAND and cosponsored the event "Source Code Review" Festival organized by our company. ↩︎