How to open virtual workshops
You get an invite for a three hour workshop on your calendar or worse, two three hour workshops back to back days and you’re dreading it. How many times has this happened to you?! I get it, time is valuable and three hours is a LONG time to spend with folks, especially when you’re doubling as a teacher, trying to find balance, and working to get on top of your endless to-do list.
I have been the sender of those workshop invites for many years, but 2020 takes the cake for number of virtual workshops in a year. I facilitated over 50+ sessions with different teams from around the world across IBM. Some sessions where centered around solving problems for users, some for team building, some for digital enablement, some for agile ceremonies and some for visioning what the future could be.
I have heard numerous times from session attendees “wow, I thought this would be a waste of time but it was really fruitful” or “can we do this again next week?” I won’t sit here and say I am a converter of people to these long sessions, but I do think magic happens when you get people together intentionally.
Three things all of my sessions (virtual + IRL) have in common:
(1) Clear outcomes
(2) Logical flow of the session with relevant activities and prompts
(3) The opening
I am going to dive into number three here and give you three tactical tips for opening your virtual workshop.
TIP 1 — Start with introductions and icebreakers to build trust. I always start with a quick intro of who I am and why I care about the work we’re about to dive into, it may be that I have an interest in the team succeeding or the product being built. Then it’s all about the attendees getting to know each other. Whether it’s a well established team or a brand new group of humans, icebreakers create space for human connection, which we’re all in a little more of a need for these days. Icebreakers also help to breakdown hierarchical divide — making the junior attendees feel comfortable in the presence of an executive, whom they learn is just a HUMAN!! I always keep it super simple and contextual to the work we’re about to dive into. Some examples of recent icebreakers: what’s the best tech innovation you’ve experienced the past year or what’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given (check out responses below). One of my favorites is to ask; what song brings you joy and as they respond I build a Spotify playlist for brainstorming music throughout the session.
Great icebreaker inspo: random question generator here and Mural warm-ups and energizers here.
TIP 2 — Give space to experiment with workshop tools. In a recent study by MITSloan Mgmt Review titled “The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age” 82% survey respondents believe that leaders in the new economy will need to be digitally savvy, yet less than 10% of respondents strongly agree that their organizations have leaders with the right skills to thrive in the digital economy. This study was published in January 2020, right before our world became digital-first. I share this because it’s important to understand that a lot of your virtual workshop attendees are still trying to understand how to use all the digital collaboration tools from slack to teams to zoom. For my workshops, I leverage Mural and Cisco Webex. I will send out a practice Mural board before the session as well as give people 5 minutes in the beginning of a session to get comfortable in the tool. I will share the basics; zooming, stickies and short-cuts and give them space to experiment and ask questions. Questions will range from “wait, how do I zoom in?” to “ummmm, where did my sticky go!?” In any other circumstance this may be embarrassing, but we opened up the space to not know and ask questions — and that has done wonders as leaders get used to these new tools to do work that was traditionally done in person.
TIP 3 — Share outcomes and set expectations. This is a no-brainer. Successful sessions only happen when there is a shared understanding of what we’re trying to achieve together. Outcomes should be aligned and understood by the leadership as well as every attendee of the session. Next up is expectation setting — this is especially important for virtual sessions. I like to put the agenda on the Mural board for the attendees to reference at any time, so they know when a break is coming or if we’re over time on a certain activity. I also like to make it clear if we have follow-up sessions planned and let them know that we’ll revisit the need for a follow-up at the close of the session. In 2020 I used the line “this will feel like rapid fire design-thinking at times and you may not feel completely done with a prompt, but I promise we won’t loose the points on the stickies and we’ll come to you for any clarification needed.” This is mainly because virtual sessions *should* be shorter than in-person sessions, meaning you shouldn’t have a virtual session longer than 3 hours and during that time you need at least two breaks aka time flies.
As humans we loose interest pretty quickly, especially when it’s easy for us to multi-task and focus on something else (like our social media or email), that is why your virtual session opening is EXTREMELY important (yes I am yelling!!) It is your role as a facilitator to catch the attention of the attendees and keep them focused on the work at hand, oh an have LOTS of fun while doing it.
I hope this is helpful for you and inspires you to put focus on the opening of your next virtual workshop.
If you want to learn more, check out my conversation with Design Thinking Ninja Jay Melone of New Haircut here.
