Deciding to Take an Event Virtual During a Crisis
The Canadian federal public service’s mass migration to remote work in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, has forced either the postponement or a rethink of the many events my department, the Canada School of Public Service, had planned for the late winter and spring (and possible longer). This includes a pilot workshop my colleague Zoe Langevin and I have been working on.
This is the first in a series of blogs that explores the process of moving an in-person event online in the middle of a pandemic. In this post I’m going to recap the process so far. In future posts I will look at our search for the right virtual platform to host the workshop, trying to recruit teams to participate in the pilot while we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and anything else that might pop up along the way.
(NB: Zoe is very much my partner in the pilot, but this is my blog and we’re not cyborgs so we each have our own opinions; please don’t hold her accountable if you don’t like what I have to say. Similarly, these are my personal reflections and not necessarily those of anyone else associated with this project).
I know that many of my public servant colleagues find themselves in the same boat; needing to move in-person events to a virtual space while also navigating the inescapable impacts of the pandemic on our work and lives. And while there’s been a proliferation of advice and how-tos* from people who have been doing this well before the pandemic, I thought it would be useful (or maybe just cathartic) for my GC colleagues to get an inside view from a non-expert trying to figure this out.
(*If you’re looking for a straight-up how-to check out the guide to going remote on busrides.ca, which is put together by some of my super smart and skilled colleagues.)
I’m jumping into this blog more than halfway through a project, so to catch you up here’s what you’ve missed…
A team-based learning-by-doing Behavioural Insights pilot
Zoe, my Director General John Gorrie, and I have been working with colleagues at the Public Service Renewal Secretariat (PSR) in PCO and to develop a pilot that would overlay business advisory services and professional development in the area of Behavioural Insights to support ‘learning by doing’ — that is, we’re testing an approach to teach teams to fish rather than teaching them about fishing, or just handing them the fish.
Originally, we intended for the pilot to include a 1-day in-person workshop to learn about Behavioural Insights principles and to develop an implementation strategy for their work. The workshop and aftercare would be delivered by talented folks at Behavioural Insights Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’). The target date for the in-person workshop was early June.
(If you’re interested in learning more about the pilot itself get in contact and we can have an offline discussion about it.)
Pivoting to Virtual
As the planning started, one of the first questions that our partners at PSR asked was whether a virtual event would be possible, as they were interested in enabling regional participation. After a discussing the idea, we decided to move forward with an in-person event — because the pilot would test the effectiveness of bundling professional development and business advisory services, we wanted to keep other variables to a minimum and avoid unnecessary complications.
After work-from-home directives went into effect for all but the public service’s essential workers it became clear that no in-person events would be happening in June. We were faced with the choice of postponing to an unknown date in the future or delivering the workshop virtually when we had already agreed that virtual wasn’t optimal.
Thankfully, our partners at BIT quickly developed a virtual event plan they thought was both viable and that would approach the quality of an in-person session. They deserve a lot of credit for understanding they couldn’t simply pick up their in-person plan and drop it into a virtual platform and expect it to work. In particular, they recognized that getting people to focus on a screen for seven or eight hours straight isn’t realistic in the best of circumstances let alone in the middle of pandemic, amidst fraying attention spans, drifting focus, heightened stress, and additional personal and family responsibilities.
So we all agreed virtual was possible if we shifted our event design to an event run as a series of short sessions (about two hours each) which could be either done on consecutive days or spread out over a couple of weeks, instead of the original 1-day plan. In addition to responding to the challenge of focusing on a screen for an extended period, this has the added benefits of built-in ‘homework time’ that both deepens the learning and provides participants with the time and space to reflect on what they’re learning and ask questions. So we think doing it this way may actually help people retain more and engage with the content in a more in depth than they would in a one-day session.
Now you’re up to date on how we how we started the process to go virtual but deciding we could execute a quality event virtually didn’t answer the question of whether running our pilot project in the middle of a pandemic was viable or advisable. Next week I will walk through some of the considerations for moving forward that are unique to this strange moment in time.
