🖍️My 101 guide to run effective Workshops
🖍️ Please don’t call it a meeting. Plan a workshop, and set a goal:
Ask yourself if you already have the inputs (information, activities, documents, data, etc.) you need to start getting the outputs (ideas, solutions, alignments, next steps, etc.) to achieve the goal
and the reason to invite more people to connect through a remote session. Something that can help you is outlining the session’s agenda, writing the session’s purpose, and adding them to the event’s description.
💻 Screen Sharing is vital to visualize your conversations and prevent misunderstandings or misinterpretations:
As you would do on a whiteboard for a face-to-face meeting, grab a pen and start drawing your ideas, or screen share the plan, presentation, or progress you have made. That’s the best way to align all participants towards the same objective rather than each one imagining in their minds the own version of what someone else is trying to say.
💬 Facilitate the Workshop and frame the conversation to avoid endless discussions:
Once you are in the meeting, take 2 minutes to introduce and explain why you are all together.
You can use the plan you built when you schedule the event and share the objective and end goal you want to achieve. Set specific goals, list them, and write them down, so everyone is on the same page. By having those goals always visible, you can quickly go back to them and make sure you and participants are not going off trails. That’s the best way to align expectations with participants and gut- check if you should be scheduling that session.
❓ Ask participants how they feel to guide the session accordingly:
The ability to read an audience while presenting and adjusting your content or style of delivery on the fly is generally considered a top-level skill for a facilitator. We also know that remote calls have also hidden participants behind the camera. That’s why you should constantly ask participants and check with them if they are following you. Please work with the mood that is in the session instead of against it!
🏁 Propose together alone activities to avoid races without a finish line:
Not everything needs to be discussed, and not everything has to be done by everyone in a workshop. We have learned that the best way to reduce time in this session is to assign tasks that can be performed individually and later reviewed by the facilitator or by a smaller group.
⏰ Time box everything to assign specific times for each part of the session:
Time’s up! As if we were in a race, grab your chronometer and pressure limits by having the tic- tac sound for specific parts of the session. Split the schedule and give participants time to talk or get into divergent or convergent thinking.