Running a Virtual Workshop
Using Online Whiteboarding solutions
Big disclaimer note: These are tips specifically for a virtual workshop — all the tips and tricks for running a workshop still apply; have an agenda, stick to your timeline, give frequent breaks, etc.
Tips for Running a Great Virtual Workshop
Upfront I’ll say that we use Miro for our diagramming and ideating. I have tried Mural as well, however I find its compatibility with trackpads problematic and couldn’t use the interface very well.
A few caveats:
- It does cost a little money to get everyone in Miro, but you can swap out team members if someone doesn’t need continual access.
(new update! If you have a team account, you can add guest editors for free — Thanks Miro!) - Everyone using it needs to have a computer that can handle the software.
We find ourselves using Miro constantly, so the investment has been well worth it.
Everyone’s Remote
This is a tip for virtual meetings in general , but it’s important enough to call out specifically. If one person is remote, everyone should be “remote”. It can be tempting to have some people in a room sticky-noting a wall and have those that are remote watch, but imbalances between team members are created with this environment.
You’ll find the best environment is when everyone joins the call individually. In our case, we had the 3 people who were present in the building join from their office, work from home, or book a small meeting room.
We’ve made it a hard rule that everyone is on video too — seeing facial expressions is important.
Lastly, use Gallery view over speaker view and show your participants how to do so as well. This increases the “collaborative space” feeling.
Give everyone a space
In an in-person workshop, you’ll often break for individual work and then come back and present what you came up with.
This is tough virtually, but a really simple solution we came up with was to give everyone a “space”. I just put everyone’s name spaced out far enough that if they zoomed in and work they couldn’t see anyone else’s work and they were on their honor to not zoom out until time was up.
For some that get distracted by all the moving cursors, entering stickies in “Bulk mode” is more helpful.
Use “Breakout Rooms”
In-person workshops may have activities where people break in groups by tables or go to separate rooms. This too is replicable online!
We tend to use Zoom for our video conferencing. Zoom has built in rooms, where you can assign participants to a breakout room and it separates people out and then brings them back to the main room at a certain time. You have to turn on this setting because it’s not automatically enabled, but once you do it’s fairly easy to use.
If you’re not using a service that has it built-in, you can still do this! (But honestly, Zoom is the best). When we’ve used Teams for video conferencing and needed to break out, I’ll designate a leader for each room to keep an eye on the time and for them to start a new call with those in their room. Then, when time is up, we’ll hop in a new call. This is a little cumbersome, but plan about 5 minutes of room-moving time and you’ll be fine.
Presenting
I rarely use a presentation during these, but if you absolutely have to, a neat pro tip to Zoom is that once you start screensharing, both you and your participants can grab the vertical bar in between the screenshare and the vertical list of participants and drag it to increase the number of participants you see.
While this does shrink the screenshare view, I’m sure you’re using good presentation practices like having 30–44pt. font, on your slides, right? Using good presentation formatting practices especially goes a long way here.
Sketching and other more tactile things
If I know ahead of time what exercises we will be running, I’ll ask participants to have pen and paper handy if they think better that way. Miro allows for file upload and does a splendid job at showing files in the board. Anyone who wants to work that way can certainly do so — draw, take a picture, email it to themselves, then upload to Miro.
If they really want to get fancy there is a mobile Miro app that probably does this more smoothly, but I’ve never tried it.
What about lost physical cues?
I actually find it easier to get a quick temperature of the room in gallery view than I do in-person! Rather than relying on your intuition, be intentional and run a simple fist-to-five to get a temperature check with 1 feeling like I’m frazzled (or whatever you want to define it as) and 5 is I’m great and good-to-go.
- Say 1,2,3
- Everyone flashes their number
- Scan the screen for high & lows
- Ask for the ‘why’ behind a number.
(Fist to five can be used in other ways too — “how do you feel about this decision?” “How are you coming in today?” etc.)
It can be done
It’s nice to be in-person, it really is, but so far I haven’t found any deficiencies to running a workshop remotely that can’t also happen in an in-person one. But most people in my organization don’t want to sketch anyway!
I’m here to help
I’ve run several of these and would love to coach you — feel free to give me a shout on Twitter, write a comment below, any way you can get ahold of me.
Did this help you?
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Ashley Crutcher is the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.
