Ten Tips for Bringing your Ideation, Action Planning or Training Workshop Online
Part 2 of 2
What happened to those strategy and ‘brainstorming’ workshops, or training sessions, where we would get 20-30 people in a room, sit in work tables, have breakout rooms with flipcharts, and put together a number of ideas and truly accomplish something as a group? Yes, there are many videoconferencing meetings with 20-30 or more participants, but how interactive are they, really? That’s right, they’re not interactive, and so we lose interest and check-out.
What if I told you that we can get the same level of interaction and enjoyment like we used to get from those large interactive training workshops, even online? Yes, it CAN be done! But we have to approach these sessions quite differently. So, how can we conduct a successful, interactive, training, ideation, or planning workshop, online? In this two-part blog, I’ll show you ten (10) strategies to making your online session interactive, productive, and fun.
Here are strategies 6-10. You can find the first five strategies yesterday’s post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ten-tips-bringing-your-ideation-action-planning-part-norm/
6. Don’t forget the fun part! (Part 2)
In a live environment, once people are relaxed, they will naturally joke around and have fun as you carry on the session, especially if they know each other. In fact, laughter should be highly encouraged. This level of spontaneity is much harder to create online, so you need to work harder to create it. The first part of this is leading by example. If you’re too formal, your audience will pick up on that and be just as serious. So, loosen up, be yourself, crack the odd joke or wisecrack, just as you would in a live environment – of course, all within the scope of the tasks you’re trying to achieve. More importantly, if the objective of your session is to generate ideas and stimulate creativity, you need to have people feel relaxed. People are the most creative when they’re having fun!
7. Maximize Interactivity
As I said above, keeping energy levels high is much more challenging in an online environment. You’ll need to maximize the opportunities for participant interaction. There are a number of ways to do this:
a. Insist on video cameras. And no mute buttons! People have become very accustomed to using their mute buttons (even before C19!), as well as not using their video cameras for a variety of reasons. The success of your session depends on people being able to interact with each other as close as possible to a live environment. When you ask people to use their mute buttons, you’re inviting them to multi-task and not engage with you. When people do not use their video cameras, you lose up to 70% of communication and the connectedness which is vital to successful interaction. Ask people not to use mute unless there is disruptive background noise or they need to cough/sneeze etc. Insist that they use their video cameras. Remember, people wouldn’t come to a live meeting in their pyjamas with blindfolds and duct tape over their mouth, but that’s what the equivalent of mute and video-off means for your session.
b. Minimize presentation time. Keep the presentation portions to a maximum of 10 minutes. If there is more material than that, send it out beforehand. Break up presentations by having your audience participate using the interactive features available on your platform, like those in the picture. You’re guaranteed to have people checking out if they go on longer. Just be careful not to get too distracted by them, and let people know you will address them at intervals during your presentation.
c. Call out individuals. In a live session, participants will use eye contact to show you that they want to make a point. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work online, as most people have not learned that they need to look directly into their camera to simulate eye contact. Even if they know about that, they use eye contact to catch the facilitator's eye, which looking into the camera doesn't do. Therefore, you need to physically call out individuals to ask them to make their points, which may put people on the spot in a live session. As long as you tell your audience up front you will do this, you’ll see that it’s largely appreciated by participants, and will also serve to restrain your more dominant participants as well as keep people engaged, as they know they will be called upon.
8. Use the Breakout Room Feature
If at all possible, use a platform with a breakout room feature (e.g. Zoom, Adobe Connect), and get familiar with it. This is the feature which will allow you to get very close to the live experience.
Divergence is used to create safer spaces, which allows for greater creativity, and this is even more important in an online environment. One thing I’ve learned from facilitating thousands of sessions (and many online ones as well) is that your audience satisfaction is directly proportional to the amount of time they actively participate (i.e. talk). It’s simple math. More people will get air time in smaller groups, so use the breakout room feature to create those smaller groups. Even more importantly, the larger the group, the more difficult it is to be creative and put forward ideas. However, when doing assigning tasks to breakout groups online you need to also do the following:
9. Be extremely clear and prescriptive with group tasks, and walk them through the task online.
This is a key difference with live sessions, where you can explain a task and most people will be able to do it based on a simple verbal explanation. In the online environment, your audience will have to first: understand the content of the task itself (what they are expected to do), but also, the method (how they do the task online). Also, as the facilitator, be sure you visit each breakout room (as you would in a live session) to make sure everyone understands both the task and how to complete it online. And remember Tip #1: practice, and then practice again, and then practice some more!
10. Don’t forget the fun part (Part 3)
Keep in mind that your session also provides a unique opportunity for colleagues to connect informally, and that connectedness is so important in today’s environment; not only for mental health and well-being, but also for that spirit of teamwork and collaboration which generates greater engagement and productivity. So, once the ‘work’ part of your session is over, plan for something fun, like a virtual lunch, or wine tasting, or my favourite: pub quiz trivia (accompanied with a beverage, of course!). There are so many virtual games you can get together around (see references below for a few ideas).
So, enjoy your online workshop. You'll surprise yourself how well it works. It's the next best thing to being there....