How to Facilitate a Remote Workshop or Meeting (If You Weren’t before the Coronavirus): Part 1
Today I responded to two requests relating to in-person workshops that were forced to be re-imagined as live, remote gatherings due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). I’ve received more and more of these requests while working as part of a distributed team the past two years.
Live workshops, meetings, and conferences can be powerful experiences. Their remote counterparts can have a similar level of impact often at a lower cost. While the nuances of virtual gatherings are critical to design for, all gatherings start with similar considerations:
- Pre-event experience: The experience leading up to the event including the attendee list, pre-readings or pre-work, tech preparation/education, etc.
- Goals: What are your goals for the workshop? What do attendees expect to get out of their time? Articulate the goals and ensure the group format and activities help you achieve those goals.
- Warm-up/check-in: Questions that open up the conversation and group are a simple way to warm up. Up your game by soliciting images, links, or emojis. Example: In the chat window, describe the last movie you saw using emojis.
- Norms and expectations: These should be set before and at the start of the meeting. At a minimum, ask that participants put their video on, abstain from multitasking, and stay on mute/unmute, depending on what the activity (and group size) requires.
- Attention and energy: This can be trickier to monitor online versus in person. Keep meetings under 90 minutes if you can or allow for a long enough break for people to leave their computers and feel refreshed. You can have people stand, stretch, or do something otherwise physical. You can also have people express how they’re feeling, or whether they understood something, by requesting they drop the relevant emojis into the chat box.
- Interactive activities: Activities online can mimic offline ones, including almost anything that would typically require Post-Its, posters, paper and pens. MURAL is my favorite online facilitation tool but I’ve developed workarounds using Google products (Jamboard, Drawings, Slides, Forms, etc.). You can move from a divergent activity like ideation using virtual Post-Its or uploaded photos of sketches to convergent activities like voting. You can also break out into smaller groups easily with Zoom and using workarounds in programs like Skype.
- Wrap-up/closing/check-out: You can close with a question, reflections, and/or you can use this time to elicit feedback. At my organization, we use a framework called “Plus/Delta” to identify what worked well and what could be improved. I also like using “I like/I wish/I wonder” or “+/-/!/?” to understand attendees’ experiences.
- Post-event: This is where you’ll send a recording and resources from the workshop, request feedback if you didn’t capture it during the meeting, and outline next steps or ways to continue engaging.
If you regularly facilitate meetings and workshops IRL, the above considerations won’t feel new though they are nuanced for online facilitation.
In Part 2, I’ll dive into specific examples of the tools I use to make live remote meetings feel interactive and engaging. Stay tuned!
This post is part of my WriteMarch series, a commitment to write daily for a month.
