What I Learnt from Hosting My First Virtual Workshop?

Last night I facilitated my first >10 people workshop on Zoom for Auckland Agile Coaching meet up and today again for the How to Deal with Anxiety workshop and more to come this week for How to Work Well from Home!

There is only one time for a first time and for sure the learning curve is a little steeper than I expected. We had 12 people joining online in Auckland, whether their homes or their “mobile office” being their motor vehicle. After all the pleasantries at the start of the meeting, we split into several breakout rooms to enable smaller group work. This was useful for people to get to know each other, build a safe to share environment and we got our team work cranking. We kept on saying we felt like guinea pigs in this live experiment of how to hold effective workshops online but we laughed our ways through our fumbles and we definitely felt very connected with each other by the end of two hours. We can all personally testify now that tough experiences help a team build trust.

Hindsight is the best sight so I would like to share with you my learnings:

1)      When adapting to new technology, we all gotta be patient and open-minded - There were times when we all learnt how to use a specific feature or waited for me the host to share screen. Throughout the virtual workshop, we acknowledged to ourselves that we cannot be stuck in the thinking that only F2F meetings are effective.

2)      Practice makes better – At the start of meeting, I forgot to intro people, forgot to share screen and accidentally closed off a discussion. At the to the end of the two hours, we all got used to turning on our mic and video and were interacting smoothly. It was quite a journey and we learnt that the key is to keep practising and do it early. As we all know, there is a difference between having the knowledge and using it.

3)      Connection online is what you make of it –  We have learnt that people can still have meaningful and productive conversations. We can facilitate a safe environment to share especially in those smaller breakout rooms to a similar effect to F2F workshop groups. Getting people to turn on their videos also helped with the virtual connection.

4)      Let’s lead by example – For all of us, in times of change, we can lead by example by taking the leap to adopt new technology. We can show that we are vulnerable too, we don’t know it all and we can make mistakes too. This is what makes us human and this will help others to jump onboard.

5)      Have an experimental mindset – This was a live experiment for the 12 of us. During changing times, if we remain open, we will see opportunities to innovate and experiment. We can grab hold of the present moment to try new things and new ways of working and to learn because our old way, F2F, is definitely not available.

In this final part, I want to share some practical tips for facilitators who want to hold effective workshops online:

·       Always check what the participants can see / hear / do in the virtual room, get them to test out the functions at the start. There might be different versions of the technology that offer different features, so double check to see what participants can do. This will make a smoother workshop.

·       When you are talking to slides, make sure you are actually sharing your screen. There were times I forgot to turn on screen share so participants were lost and could not tell if they were the only one not able to see my screen.

·       When using the chat function, double check who you are sending the messages to. Sometimes not everyone can receive the full message and in breakout rooms, you can only send messages to the participants in that particular break out room.

·       Make sure people turn on their video for a better online connection and don’t forget like I did to do a round of intro before the start pf a session.

·       If there are materials that participants need to work on during the session, send those via email/slack before the workshop. If you share the files in the virtual room via chat for example, make sure everyone can access it.

·       Similar participant limit for meetings applies whether it is F2F or virtual, e.g. one facilitator/teacher for no more than 15 participants because any more it would be hard to facilitate an effective workshop unless it is a seminar/talk. For 12 participants, we had three breakout rooms and when the groups started to work at different pace, that saw me literally running from one breakout room to another to facilitate like a marry-go-around. Definitely have your water bottle ready for the thirst!

I hope all of you adapt well to the new reality of working from home and have a go at adopting new technology. Happy virtual workshop facilitating and keep safe 😊