How to foster collaboration and increase productivity in virtual environments?

My experience with online meetings workshops!

Turning endless discussions into guided conversations has helped us improve participation and increase energy levels, and has left us with more time to get our work done.

We’ve all left meetings feeling bad about what we discussed only to later wonder why so little happened as a result? Where did the momentum go? Working remotely, meetings had gotten even worse, with endless conversations and a group of people stepping into each other’s arguments, and not giving someone else the chance to express and unblock the loop we got into when we accepted that meeting invite.

That feeling goes from bad to worse when you have so many meetings that you can’t get your work done. At Zemoga, we experimented, turned some of the discussions into more structured and guided conversations, and framed those sessions into Workshops. But, you might be asking, why are workshops different from regular meetings?

...Why workshops and not meetings? People that I’ve worked with answered this question based on their experiences as facilitators and participants, below you will find a variety of goals, sessions, and roles, describing how each person discovered and lived the power of workshops for each specific case:

Requirement Review

Running workshops instead of meetings has allowed me to guide the requirement alignment discussion towards the goals I want to achieve: gather insights from all the participants and build a robust product alignment definition that reflects all perspectives.

Facilitator: Daniela Bello, Business Analyst

Grooming Session

Explaining user stories to development teams and ensuring they fully understand it has always been a challenge. Since I started using Miro boards to reinforce the refinement session messages,
I noticed they lost less relevant information and performed better analysis over user stories.

Facilitator: Wendy Motta, Business Analyst

Brainstorming Session

“It’s not a race, but ... how many ideas per minute do you think you can come up with at a meeting? It works so differently when you are part of a workshop with a clear methodology to achieve more than 100 ideas within half an hour. It’s more than “being creative”; it’s about receiving a powerful incentive in the right direction.”

Participant: Carlos Agudo, Creative Lead

Technical Roadmap

The new workshop methodology helps us be more interactive by involving all participants in the proposed solution, keeping them connected and aware. As technical leaders, it helps us understand the different points of view from

the other disciplines and consider them in the solution.

Participant: Diego Gamboa, Back End Developer

1on1 sessions

Want to play? This is the question I ask before we end a 1:1. Using a board, you get to select a card and unveil a question leading you to reflect on your own personal and professional experiences and even help you work through present challenges. I would never imagine so much expectation could be built using a workshop technique.

Mentor/Coach: Paola Gonzalez, Program Manager

Branding a new initiative for Zemoga

I have discovered that through these workshop sessions, the ideas of others inspire and generate new ideas. It is a spontaneous process and teamwork that nurtures both ways. This should be applied to any project or area of the company.

Participant: Catalina Maya, Marketing Coordinator