Virtual event - real/real taste

Socializing and personal exchange are very important at SPIRIT/21. However, Covid19 is regularly a real spoilsport at the table and so the idea for an online cooking event was born a few months ago.

But how do you manage to organize a virtual event for 500 employees and their families and relatives? Our marketing and communications team came up with a solution! We received the menu and shopping list by email a week before the event. A shopping voucher arrived in the post and thus constituted an invitation to dinner together.

In my private life, I am not Head of Sales, but Head of Procurement! So on Thursday evening, I went shopping with the list of ingredients. Fresh spices, meat, cheese, apples, marzipan, vegetables and much more. The shopping bag was full of fresh, healthy products. For a few years now, I’ve made sure to buy regional products and organic produce wherever possible.

During the quarterly meeting moderated by our CEO Markus Sieber via teams, the components for the menu were already ready in the kitchen. The management regularly informs us about strategic and operational issues. Quarterly figures and successes were transparently highlighted in the home office, while in the kitchen next door one or two kitchen fairies were probably already chopping away and good spirits were setting the table festively in the background.

After a short break, the cooking event started at 5.30 p.m. via YouTube livestream. The laptop was placed on the coffee machine, the kitchen aprons were tied up and I eagerly followed the start of an eventful evening with my partner. As host, Verena Behr skillfully guided us through the evening and immediately switched to Markus Sieber in his kitchen, which he said he only knew from afar. He greeted the 250 colleagues and their 500 or so relatives who had joined him from kitchens and living rooms.

Immediately afterwards, Jeannie Collin and Salvatore Romano reported from their well-structured professional kitchen and as soon as they prepared several courses at the same time, seemingly effortlessly with practiced hand movements and a lot of routine, chaos broke out in most SPIRITian kitchens. The group chat on YouTube ran hot, with talk of cuts, capitulation, ordering pizza, booking a table in a restaurant or calling the divorce lawyer!

Fortunately, we had our technical team in the background at the filming location to ensure that everything ran smoothly. Together with Verena Behr, who was not only the presenter but also the director, the professionals’ “program” was interrupted, the steps since the beginning of the event were repeated in detail and everything was slowed down. Peace returned to the kitchens and parlors.

Music from various bands was played and the amateur chefs at home were given some time to catch up on the preparatory work - washing and chopping vegetables, sorting and weighing ingredients. The live links to the kitchens of the management members also brought a sense of calm and humor to the group. Even the chefs didn’t have all the pots under control but remained calm and in a good mood.

It was a wonderful evening. You could say it was a virtual Christmas dinner for SPIRIT/21 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Many hands are needed in the background to make an event like this happen. I would like to express my sincere thanks to these colleagues. I would also like to thank the chefs Jeannie Collin and Salvatore Romano and our management Markus Sieber, Andreas Weiss, Marc Bittig, Eberhard Armbruster, Joachim Gutheil, Justin Taylor and Klaus Eitelbuss.

At SPIRIT/21, cooperation is a way of life and the statement that employees are our greatest asset is not a farce but a fact!