5 things we learnt from running remote demos
I started working with the Supporter Insight and Testing (SI&T) team at CRUK last summer. We’re a small team who support people at CRUK to put supporters’ needs at the heart of their work. The team had already adopted an Agile way of working and, as part of this, conducted demos on a fortnightly basis to share updates on their projects with the wider directorate.
If you’re not familiar with ‘demos’, they’re meetings that provide an opportunity for key stakeholders to be updated on a product or project. They help everyone understand what’s going on and can act as a great feedback loop. Traditionally demos are carried out face-to-face. However, when you join a directorate in which 66% of the employees work remotely, then sometimes ‘tradition’ needs to be challenged.
So in SI&T, every demo we ran was remote.
To do this, we had to adapt a traditionally face-to-face Agile fundamental to suit a directorate that, firstly, didn’t work in an Agile way and, secondly, had a huge proportion of remote workers within it.
I had no prior experience of Agile but strongly supported the objectives of the demos — engagement and collaboration — and was keen to see how we could adapt our communication. SI&T had set up a short survey to get feedback on our demos, and we saw that we weren’t quite reaching the levels of collaboration and engagement we’d been hoping for. So we decided to set up a test & learn approach to the demos.
Over the course of several weeks, survey responses were gathered, analysed and used to shape iteration after iteration of the demo. After running the test on our demos, we joined Community Development’s ‘Spotlight’ — an initiative set up that involved different teams presenting at a regular update to the rest of the department, via Skype.
We’ve used what we’ve learnt to support Spotlight, and wanted to share our thoughts more widely. So we ran a test on presenting remotely at a Technology team stand-up, to see how our ways of working translated across departments.
It was amazing to see almost 90 people dial in at the peak of the call and interact with the remote meeting. Several colleagues took the time to give us positive feedback afterwards — mentioning everything from new resources they had learnt about, to being able to join in as a home worker for the first time.
There were also challenges. Some people were unfamiliar with the tools being used, which identified the importance of training. And a technical problem sparked a conversation about which tools work better than others.
Overall, the audience appeared to like the use of video — thankfully no one had a child gate-crashing the call akin to the BBC News 2017 moment
The product team that look after CRUK’s core websites also often work remotely and were happy to join us in the test of presenting remotely. They’ve tried, tested and learnt a fair few things along the way too.
So here are 5 things we learnt from our remote demo tests:
Don’t use jargon
We all love a bit of jargon here and an acronym there, but we found that it pays dividends in terms of audience engagement to cut it out. The word ‘demo’ for example was quickly changed to ‘show and tell’. I thought a demo was a music recording so…
Cake club is not conducive to engagement
One piece of feedback we received was that our demo was scheduled after cake club so everyone was feeling too sugared up to focus. Basically, we had to consider logistics — timing, number of presenters, background noise etc. The content may be amazing but if it isn’t packaged in the right way, people may not be as receptive to it.
Make content relevant and relatable
Everyone loves a bite-sized chunk of information they can relate to and apply to their work. And we found that if the content isn’t accessible, the audience will never know just how good it is.
Wake the audience up
One of the challenges of working remotely is the dreaded silence on Skype calls. We used to ask if there were any questions at the end of our demos and would often get fewer people interacting than we’d hoped for. I’m a talker but will sometimes sit on mute afraid to ask a question if I don’t feel comfortable in a virtual meeting of other silent observers. So we started to bring in other forms of interaction — virtual ice breakers if you will. We found that it helps less confident audience members get involved and wakes up those who have had their own cake club prior to the call!
One remote, all remote
A great rule that does what it says on the tin! If you have one remote worker participating in a meeting, then all join remotely to make it run smoother (even if you’re in a main office).
Always keep experimenting, learning and improving. There’s no harm in trying lots of different things to see what works best for you. For example, an interactive board can be a great tool to support workshops and can be good for sharing resources.
Everyone has their own preferred way of working. Some of us love to work remotely, and some of us hate the very idea of it. The main thing we have learnt is that there are always ways to adapt, regardless of the situation we’re faced with.
Next on the horizon is to continue championing remote work and, for the staff working on Spotlight in Community Development, they plan to continue developing it to encourage even more teams and departments to share their knowledge. Because knowledge is power after all, right?
