Lessons in remote collaboration

At my organisation we have been working in a hybrid model, some days in the office and some at home, for the last 2 years. With all the challenges our community and society has experiences, we are always aiming to deliver new digital initiatives for our members, customers and wider community.

This is a common story.

Before 2020, historically being an office culture of everybody in the office, Monday to Friday during standard office hours – this was, like for many, a big cultural shift. I feel fortunate that the support for adapting to this new world and pushing forward into new ways of working has been fantastic and this is very exciting for my team of curious designers — who are involved with everything from discovery to design to delivery.

Running workshops.

Well, a lot has changed but a lot has stayed the same too. Before I get into our lessons, I always feel context is important. If I had to look back at my career and the thousands of hours I’ve spent planning and running workshops, I’ll give you a break down in phases.

• Phase A: 15 years ago and earlier – 100% face to face
• Phase B: Within the last 10 years (pre March 2020) – 90% face to face, 10% remote
• Phase C: ‘The Covid Times’ from March 2020 to today – 100% remote

Phase A.

The tools just didn’t cut it – besides the occasional Skype call, it just couldn’t be a workshop – it was a meeting.

Phase B.

I was working for a national organisation with clients across Australia. Most of my workshops would see me flying around the country to handle face to face all day design sessions, we would occasionally run follow ups or condensed versions online. However, majority of the time was still face to face.

The tools at the time were basic, limited whiteboarding and co-collabroation. It was wasn’t smooth and was disjointed, but you could sense it was heading in the right direction.

Then in 2020, the rest is history – we shifted 100% remote.

Phase C.

The timing ended up being ideal for my current team as late 2019 I had just started at my current organisation and position as the leader of our Experience Design team. At this time we decided to make the transition for our team to switch to Figma.

Initial reasons were to break down internal team cultural challenges where collaboration wasn’t happening organically, little did I know that having that remote web-based collaboration would become so critical for our success going forward.

What wasn’t perfect timing was early 2020 buying a new batch of stationery for my workshop toolkit which has remained untouched since that day. They will get used soon enough.

Back to it.

If you asked me in that ‘Phase A’ and ‘Phase B’ period, I was against running remote workshops, opting to do these face to face wherever possible for a number of reasons:

1. Technology, I love you and get frustrated by you at the same time.
2. Body language is easy to read in a physical room, when people aren’t being engaged you’re able to encourage them to get involved.
3. Getting a group of people in a room for a workshop is great for creating connections and that is hard remotely.
4. In a physical room, you can force people to switch off from other distractions. Phones down, laptops away – focus on the questions and activities.
5. I couldn’t confidentiality justify to the business or clients, why it was better to go remote.

However, over the last 2 years of running a significant number of remote based workshops my team and I have discovered a number of advantages to operating this way.

So much so, I want to go back to me in 2020 and have a stern talking to myself. How could I be so short sighted?!

The above perceived challanges can be resolved in different ways. For my team and I, the way forward for our organisation is going to be a hybrid working approach and this means either internally or with our members/customers we will be aiming to conduct a blend of online or in-person workshops.

So below are some lessons, thoughts and ideas for you to be inspired with – I hope they help you make your workshops an online success.

Size matters, keep it small.

A lesson I’ve learned is if I was running a workshop in person, I would usually aim for 25–30 people, and this was always the ideal mix. You get that noise in the room, people can mingle during breaks, sit in grouped tables of 4–5 people and it’s like a traditional classroom size. Personally, I’ve found this to be too much online.

A suggestion for an online workshop is to aim for a size between 10–12 people. Now if you really wanted that larger sample size, it might just mean running the workshop multiple times, and (I’ll touch on this later) that’s fine because you’ll notice online, you’ll save yourself time with other activities. However, if you do need a larger group, take advantage of break-out rooms (again, I’ll touch on this later).

By aiming to keep it small, you avoid the risk of having most of the attendees feeling like bystanders with people getting into discussions, feeling it’s not up to them to answer, or having vocal attendees drowning out others. While this can happen in face-to-face workshops too, the impact to others is amplified online as it can alienate others quicker than in person.

As with everything we do in design, it’s all about learning and I learned quickly for this reason about keeping the group size small. It allows you to keep the conversation moving and being a small size, you can reference individuals by name where you feel particular attendees aren’t speaking as much as others.

Ask yourself, can you do multiple sessions?

Smaller groups do allow you to revisit the traditional structure of a workshop. I don’t have answers on what is “perfect” but what I’ve learned is we can ask ourselves questions:

Do you need to run everything in one day?

Instead of a single 4-hour workshop, can you split that into separate 2-hour workshops run over multiple days?

Remember, you don’t need to book rooms, you don’t need to be limited by physical limitations we’ve had in the past. When running discovery sessions for our Design System governance with many stakeholders across the business we ran 2 separate workshops to ensure a blend of team members but also to keep the groups small.

Example of a FigJam file

Adapt your activities.

Think carefully about your activities, your audience and remind yourself – you are no longer bound by traditional constraints. So a few things to unpack here;

• Typical sketching activities are going to be “harder”(ish) to conduct online. You can ask participants if they have access to an iPad, Surface or other touch screen device, and perhaps in break-out groups make sure at least one of those people is within a group and can be “The Artist” drawing. If you are using a tool like Miro or Figma they can sketch in front of the groups or if you really need, sketch on paper and add photos to the virtual whiteboard.
• Ask yourself, do we need everybody for the entire session? One of the advantages of being online means it’s easier to bring people in and out into a room. This does mean for certain activities if you need an SME you can dial those people in for that activity only.
• People have access to the thing called “The Internet” let them use it! If you’re running a persona creation activity, let people source material, visuals, photos or YouTube videos or whatever they feel relevant to help create the picture of your persona. Bring them to life in new ways. Make it more interactive, and again if you’re using a tool like Figma — you can include ALL this and more into the interactive board and as a group starts bringing the wall to life.
• Question the length of activities, things that perhaps used to take longer in person you might find are now faster online — or the other way. You’ll learn and be able to adapt. So your only way is to try, try small and learn.

Don’t think about your standard activities as now being “limited online”, view this as an opportunity to understand how you can evolve these in a new way.

Less pressure ‘on the day’.

By mid-2020 after a few online collaboration workshops, I started to realise that, the hours leading up to the workshop were not as stressful. It took me a while to put my finger on it, while I still had the normal moment of “Oh! What happens if this doesn’t go to plan?!” … but there was less pressure because — everything had been planned on the days beforehand. The activities, the agenda, the approach, the boards, people’s access etc were all done in the days leading up. Not the panic situations of an hour before you walk into a room, frantically putting up paper sheets, getting post-it notes ready, markers not working, unexpected noisy meeting happening next door or worrying when the catering was going to turn up. All of those little things just don’t matter online and you’re able to focus on the workshop.

So a few things I’ve done differently to help make the day less stressful.

• Share the agenda — Aim to give this to attendees in the days leading up to the workshop. Provide a list of the task names, all the times allowed and along with a quick description. This will set expectations and allow people to know that if they do need to be contactable to their team during the day they can during other times and this will help them avoid answering messages during your workshop.
• Test access — If you’re running a white-boarding session, in the days leading up make sure people can access your board and I recommend asking them to contribute a post-it note to a selected section on the board. Perhaps answering “What do you want to learn from the session?” or “What did you have for breakfast?”. The reason I suggest this is, because sometimes people may be able to view a board but not contribute to it and it also gives you a checklist of those people you don’t need to follow up. This removes the stress so you can hit the ground running.

Invite users to contribute to the board on the days leading up, will allow you to know if they have the right access and a basic understanding of how to use the tool. Follow up with any attendees who don’t complete this beforehand to see if they are having troubles.

• Check your technology – Similar to the one above, but more about the visual and audio communication on the day. Whoever is presenting with you, test out a few scenarios to make sure that you can be seen and heard clearly. If you’re including external participants outside of the business, make sure they are able to share video or items via chat if they need. Any of these little things can break the flow of a workshop very quickly.
• Get the boards ready – This is the biggest luxury I love now, as a team we can create workshop boards for days or weeks beforehand and test them out, walk through them as a group, test with another team and refine this over time. To have these boards ready for us to take from workshop to workshop, is fantastic and such a luxury and good for the environment since we can just click “Duplicate Board”.

Keep it all on the board.

Avoid switching between tools. If you are using a collaboration board, keep everything on there. Don’t have a PowerPoint with agenda items, you can export that and have it on the board. This allows everybody to have access to everything at once. They aren’t referring back to meeting agendas in invites and possibly getting distracted in their email.

Also, this removes the need for you to switch between tools and closing screen sharing and sharing another screen — while a small moment — it’s a moment where your audience will switch off onto something else. You need to do your best to keep their attention throughout the session.

How do we communicate during the session?

If you don’t make it clear to participants how you prefer they communicate together, then they will make their own decisions and boy will that be a mess.

What I mean by this is the following:

• Chat — make it clear the purpose of the chat, for example, will a question be answered via the chat or only asked? If you have another team member answering questions in the chat while you’re explaining an activity, it can then lead to 2 conversations happening at the same time and cause confusion for participants. I would suggest you have somebody read questions out in this situation and they are answered by the facilitator to the group through audio/video.
• Raise Hand — Encouraging users to raise their hand to speak does allow for everybody to speak, without users talking over the top of each other is always a good idea. It is important to keep track of how long a participant has their hand up for too, you don’t want 15 mins to go by without answering their question.
• Comments on the board — If you’re using an online white-boarding tool, I do encourage people to leave questions or comments directly on a board (perhaps define a particular post-it note). This will allow you to visually keep track of questions and where they relate to the content.
• Separate chats — Have the main group chat and make sure to have a separate chat running with your fellow facilitators — an area to talk through issues, or highlight participants that need encouragement to get involved or to even remind reach other of timing.

Collaboration on the day.

With no more walls to cover in post-it notes, you’ll need a digital canvas to run your activities, so attendees can all follow along simultaneously. Looking back, there is a part of me that is happier for environment with this trend for more online collaboration.

Anyway, tools to use – the big players are Miro (who has seen a 600% increase in business since 2020), Mural, FigJam (or Figma) and many more. We’ve been using Miro for whiteboarding and Figma for design, with the last 12 months looking to use Figma’s FigJam more – with all of them, no real issues just some small differences. I think with anything, pick something that is going to work for you.

Set up your canvas.

Set up your huge canvas which you can use to create your workshop sheets and keep one board for each workshop. Just split activities up by art-boards or areas. Most of these tools come with a suite of out of the box templates, with the added capability for you to create your own custom templates and as your team uses these more and more, that library will only grow.

Some standards for your board I would suggest is:

• An introduction panel – rather than having a seperate PowerPoint slide deck with the goals/outcomes for the day, include that information on the board. This will allow people to refer back to it without having to switch to another tool and possibly get distracted.

Include a welcome area and an intro panel for users to refer back too throughout the session, keeping everything on the board.

• Icebreaker – Include an icebreaker activity on the board too, a great simple one we’ve used is “Find a character”. Get participants to find a picture of a character on the Internet that summerizes their mood for the day, mine was Bandit the Dad from Bluey. This is something fun to share but also allows you to test your groups capabilities with using the tool, will they know how to copy and paste something into the board. If they can’t, it’s a good opportunity for you to help them before you get stuck into an activity.

Icebreaker: Pick Your Character. An example of a simple ice breaker to get to know people, but make sure they can use the tool before the session starts.

• Your activities – separate these out into art-boards and place these in a logical order, I would also include appox. start and end times next to the titles of each of your boards. This will allow the group to see how we are tracking for time. Also feel free to make your boards bigger, adjust things as the day goes — it’s so much easier than if you were in a room.
• Parking lot – as always, there will be items that you simply won’t have time for or come up at the wrong point of the session. Set a parking lot and you can allow people to put items there themselves or your facilitator can move them when appropriate.

Timing!

This isn’t new for a workshop, sticking to your agenda timing is really important. However, as you’ll have people in different locations and environments sitting at a computer screen it can be easier to lose track of time.

This is where technology can help you. Within tools like Miro you’ll find a helpful timer, where all participants can see it and you’ll be able to time box each activity.

I actually find this better than an in person workshop, where you’d be having to shout out “5 mins left!” or walk around with a clock — the timer is on screen for everybody to see.

​​​​​​​Plus, Miro has some great background music too.

Take a break!

No brainer. If you’re running these sessions and while people are used to working at their computer for long periods of time, the involvement is more intense and can be draining for participants. My rule is anything other 1.5 hours, pop a small break in there. 2 hours, a 5 min break. 3 hours, a 15 min break and so forth. Will allow people to recharge, toilet break, grab a drink, have a break … anything.

When going on a break: I ask users to turn their cameras off and go on mute, not leave the meeting. I’ll play some background music during the break they can hear and this will allow them to know when we are coming back to get started too.

No matter what, some things might not go to plan.

Any workshop, online or in-person — things might not go to plan. I will always start with the workshops similar to flight safety instructions, that we are doing something we do every day and might experience some ‘turbulence’ during the day. Which is fine, we’ll work through it as a team and get through it together.

So don’t panic, stay calm, and everybody will understand and enjoy the session.

After the workshop.

This is the BEST part of an online workshop.

Depending on the audience, you may want to share back some of the findings. The best part is you can do this on the board they helped create. Using their work, their notes, their words — allows you to create a story they were part of and that is truly something not to take for granted. The impact this has on your participants demonstrates their input was valued and their time was worth it.

To wrap up — try new things, learn and focus on outcomes.

The takeaway I have from running workshops online is we as designers along with others have the opportunity to explore new methods of achieving the same outcomes. We all know that a successful workshop is to focus on the output first, focusing on those outcomes and objectives will help you and your team decide on the activities and format you need to get what you require from the session.

Start there, don’t be limited to the traditional methods and experiment. Being online you have the ability to conduct more in-depth walkthroughs with your team, going through the board and visually seeing how the session will unfold. Something that is difficult to do beforehand face to face.

I also see the advantage being we are able to hold workshops and involve our audience in a way that is convenient to them - no travel, low commitment and also has a lower impact on the environment.

The trend and advantages for how we collaborate online will only continue, for new designers entering the industry, this is their ‘norm’ now. So they will be comfortable in this space and help it flourish over time … and that is pretty exciting to me.

Now, if I look back and wonder why years ago I was against online workshops.

Two reasons: I had no experience in doing it and the technology wasn’t there to make it an enjoyable experience.

Now that new services have improved that experience for us as facilitators and our audience, we are able to create meaningful and enjoyable workshops while discovering solutions together.