How to Run a Virtual Workshop
Techniques for Virtual Workshops — Part 1
Many find themselves working from home and are struggling to find ways to accomplish what may often feel easy in the traditional office environment. How do you get to know your colleagues on a personal level? How do you run an effective brainstorming session? Is it possible to run a design sprint from home?
These are all things we have experience with here at the Samsung NEXT Product Team where we’re distributed across 15 timezones, 5 global offices, and over 40% of us don’t sit in an actual “office seat.” Our SVP recently shared a key part of how we think about building an inclusive distributed team environment.
When I worked in a typical office setting, it was a lot easier to bump into a coworker and strike up conversation in the halls or on the elevator. While this is one of the (few) things I miss from my traditional office days, I have discovered some creative ways to build these moments of connection with the distributed teams I support at Samsung NEXT.
In today’s fast-paced, always-connected environment where people seek immediate gratification of their needs, transactional conversations are the default, where we heavily rely on Slack, text and email with fewer opportunities for casual, organic conversations. A byproduct of this is that we rarely get to know more about the person with whom we are interacting. This may be especially true for distributed teams.
In today’s fast-paced, always-connected environment…transactional conversations are the default…with fewer opportunities for casual, organic conversations.
Do we just have to accept that our personal connections with our distributed colleagues will always be weaker? Is this a necessary sacrifice and a cold reality of distributed work? We don’t think so. We believe strong, authentic personal connections can be established amongst a distributed team if we create the right environment to foster them virtually. What does that mean? What are some tools and techniques that may be helpful to build distributed team cultures around the globe?
It’s hard to answer this in just one post, but I’ll start by describing some of the key components to running a virtual workshop with a distributed team.
Virtual Workshops 101
Running a virtual workshop is no different than running a co-located workshop. The key is identifying the essential ingredients and figuring out ways to replicate them in the digital world:
- Translating the Physical Workspace to a Digital One
- Co-Creating with Co-Workers in a Co-Located Space
- Facilitating Group Engagement
- Breakout Sessions
- Voting with your Feet
- Keep Time to Stay Focused and On Track
Translating the Physical Workspace to a Digital One
In the real world, we have physical spaces and things to help us identify and frame what we are working on, who we are sharing with, and where/how we are sharing those thoughts. We’ll typically place big poster boards in different areas of a big room, individual notepads for people to jot down thoughts, and a dedicated wall where team members can walk-up and post sticky notes. With a distributed team, we don’t have the physical workspace and materials to frame how we interact with each other.
With an online whiteboard collaboration tool, such as Miro, we set up digital frames to separate content and organize our virtual workspace. We gave each team member their own frame where they could work independently (think: sticky note brainstorming). We also create a central frame in the workspace (we call it the “Main Stage”) where group collaboration can happen.
Co-Creating with Co-Workers in a Co-Located Space
Another key element of in-person workshops is that feeling you get from being in the same room, looking at the same things, and collaborating on the same challenge. Many tools allow you to track the real-time location of another collaborator in the same digital space. You see in Miro how the team’s cursors are moving around giving a sense of presence. This coupled with video conferencing and screen sharing can replicate the feeling of co-creating with co-workers in a co-located space.
Facilitating Group Engagement
Every seasoned facilitator knows that engaging a group in discussion can be hard enough when in-person. It becomes that much harder when you are running a virtual workshop since you can’t always grasp all of the subtle body language cues from the room. To confront this, I will regularly check-in with the group by asking how their energy levels are doing. I also keep a close eye on their videos to try and pick up their engagement levels. This helps me understand if we need to speed up, slow down, or take an unscheduled break. You should always be prepared to call an audible in your agenda and run an energizing activity to recharge the team.
Breakout Sessions
Some people find talking in larger groups very intimidating and will refrain from engaging in discussion. During in-person workshops, I will often organize breakout groups to have smaller teams work together to drive greater participation. In a virtual workshop, this can still be done by creating separate virtual rooms for your groups to join. We use breakout groups in Zoom where I could automatically (or manually) assign participants.
Voting with your Feet
Voting with your feet is an easy and effective physical technique I like to use when trying to help a team decide which option to choose. This involves people physically moving to a part of the room to signify their vote. Another technique is to create a heat map. We give dot stickers to each person so they can place it on the option they prefer best.
Silent techniques like voting with your feet and heat maps can avoid having opinions be heavily skewed by the person who talks the loudest or who presents the most charismatic sales pitch. Many online tools allow for group voting with the option to have votes be anonymous and hidden until the voting period has ended. This is actually a benefit for the virtual approach over physical workshops where voting is often influenced by groupthink.
Keep Time to Stay Focused and On Track
One of my favorite facilitator tools is my Time Timer. I’ve dragged it all over the world with me. Timeboxing workshops is the most important tip I can offer. Luckily, this is probably the easiest to replicate in a digital workshop. Make use of the built-in timer in many of these tools to keep brainstorms, discussions, and breakout sessions on track.
What’s NEXT?
The advancements in digital tools that enable distributed teams to work so effectively outside the constraints of four walls continues to amaze me! In my next post, I share how we applied these principles during a recent virtual workshop focused on strengthening personal connections within a team.
What tools do you have in your toolkit that help you run effective virtual workshops? What pain-points have you felt from the transition to working from home?
