What are the best strategies to manage your time during a virtual workshop?

From my experience, The best strategies to manage our time during a virtual workshop include setting clear objectives, being prepared, using interactive tools, and incorporating breaks. Setting clear objectives helps us prioritise the content and activities, ensuring that we cover the most important topics. Preparation involves familiarising yourself with the tools and technology. Using interactive tools, such as polls, quizzes, and breakout rooms, keeps participants engaged and facilitates active participation. Lastly, incorporating breaks throughout the workshop helps maintain focus and prevent fatigue. By following these strategies, we can effectively manage our time and deliver an effective virtual workshop.

Make the material easy to follow. We tend to try to add too much information to meetings like these, which reduces anything meaningful coming from our mouths. The military says it best: Keep it simple, stupid.

You might not always use them, but breakout rooms and polls are really essential tools to have. However, they are only useful if you are an expert at using them. Some platforms are more user-friendly in this respect than others.

If people are registering for the course, share the agenda beforehand, and ask if they have specific needs/goals based on the topics to be discussed. Or even create a poll for the topics, to see what the majority of the attendees need me to focus on most. Quality over quantity, keep the agenda precise and stick to it during the course. If questions/comments arise that are off-topic, use that as a guide for you next course/offering.

Choose a couple session components in advance that can either be skipped or shortened if necessary. Keep a casual eye on the clock and don’t say ‘oh we ran out of time’ or ‘we’re going to skip this piece’ - just keep moving fluidly. Calling out the meta can be distracting, they care more about the content! You can also set timers for session components to keep yourself on track or ask someone to help monitor the chat and clock alongside you.

Asking the group to respond using emojis at key times can be very useful asking follow up questions. I use live Notion pages to encourage people to add to discussions in real time. This content can then form follow up discussions and reflections for all participants, as well as bosses. One of my favourite ideas is to ask for quotes and pictures from the group…perhaps something they find motivating…and to use this public build approach.

Co-creating, or at least agreeing, ground-rules with participants at the start is essential; it establishes expectations that you, or they, can reinforce or update during the session. As trainers/facilitators, we also need to model what we expect from delegates. So I disagree with the article's suggestion I'd 'have to deal with emails, phone calls, messages...' Before starting training, I close down all unnecessary tabs, hide and silence notifications etc so I can give my fullest attention to the delegates. Ultimately though, people are less likely to be distracted if they are finding the session valuable - working out how to offer real value, and then offering it, is the true key here.

It's good to invite participants to share their own experiences. Be prepared to stop recording and/or agree Chatham House Rules so that people feel free to share.

This is already tough when it's in-person but even tougher when it's virtual since they're already on their laptops and may have multiple tabs open. 1. Set ground rules 2. Keep groups small so you can ensure you engage every single person. 3. Ask for commitments at the start 4. Keep activities flowing

Set aside some time to educate participants on the apps/tools they'll be using, and for troubleshooting. If you don't, this will inevitably eat into your time.