Don't cancel your Leadership Workshop!!! – Take it online

Simple step-by-step guide with sample agendas

Don't cancel your strategy offsite or leadership team retreat. During the current coronavirus crisis you need to spend time with your leadership team. Here are 10 specific steps along a sample agenda of how you can turn a 2-day event into a crisp online format of about 2 half-days. You can transfer the insights to other face-to-face workshops you want to turn online.

Many of us had planned leadership or strategy retreats towards the end of Q1. It's the perfect time – books for 2019 are finally closed, and it's time to review the strategic goals for 2020. Typically such workshops last 1,5-3 days. They are either fun or dreadful, depending on your team composition and your meeting practices.

With the coronavirus crisis, you might think it's best to cancel. PLEASE DON'T!!!

Right now is the time for coming together

Right now is the time for you to align in your leadership team. The time when you need to do contingency planning. You should also be thinking about how you talk to your employees, how to act responsibly and truthfully while also providing comfort and stability. And you should be there for each other, if, for example, you are worried about the future of your business. Coming together online can also be a really fun experience, now that people bring a real openness toward video conferencing technology.

However, it's not straightforward. You can't just take an 8-10 hour day online, that would be a nightmare. But there are smart ways to transfer your agenda to an online workshop successfully. Here's how.

How to transform your offline agenda into an online agenda

Together with a colleague, I am planning a top-team leadership workshop for an international company operating in over 20 countries. They are in the midst of a large transformation. Their international leadership team (LT) was to meet at the headquarter in early April for 2 days. I created a quick-and-dirt anonymized agenda from this case.

Here's the rough agenda we had planned:

While I'm sure you love our beautiful and thought-through agenda, you immediately see the problems: Two very packed long days, lot's of interactive exercises, long presentations, and even an evening with team building. How to turn this into a meaningful online format with the same outputs?!?!

Step-by-step transformation guide

Ok, so what did we actually do to transform a 2-days workshop into a crisp online version which delivers the same results? Here are 10 steps we performed to adapt the agenda. At the end of this article you can see the new agenda.

1. Be much more stingy with time. People have a short attention span. In a physical workshop setting, you can keep them engaged more easily, but online they will drift away. Limit workshops to at most 5-6 hours (with senior, very committed teams) or 3-4 hours with average leadership teams. We reduced our workshop from 13+8.5 hours to 6+4.5 hours.
2. Use tech tools. We use a Kahoot quiz as energizer, a timer-app to limit presentations, Zoom for VC with breakout session functionality, Poll Everywhere to brainstorm and prioritize so whats, and Google docs to collaborate on the transformation plan. There are of course many other great ones, such as Mural or Klaxoon.
3. Pre-reading instead of lengthy presentations. We ask each leader to circulate their presentations up front together with a short recorded voice-over (6-8 minutes). Leaders thus come to the virtual workshop with all the knowledge digested, and we only discuss key questions, which is much more efficient. Given you offer a much shorter workshop you are entitled to ask for this prep time.
4. Split the group up often. We do this to keep everybody engaged and active. They can't zone out if they are in a 3-way breakout. Zoom and Goto Training have great functionality for that, but you can even to it in Skype or MS Teams and just nominate group leaders who initiate the breakout call. In this case you have to trust them to come back to the plenary call on time (while Zoom or Goto Training give you the power to force-call them back.)
5. Put in a buffer. We have done many online workshops, but we still are cautious. We might have underestimated the time needed, so we explicitly put a buffer of 1 hour in the agenda in the afternoon of day 1.
6. Include social elements. Whenever people meet in person they not only work but they bond as humans. We have to recreate this online. There are many ways. This time we opted for 2-min apartment tours, where people take us around their home via video. This has to be aligned up front, so everybody can tidy up beforehand :-) Be creative and define your own social challenge!
7. Include other people. Running the workshop virtually gave us the opportunity to include the change agent team who ran the organizational pulse check. Each change agent will host one break-out session presenting their findings and facilitating a discussion. We as facilitators will rotate the leaders through the break-out sessions every 10 minutes, so each leader visits every station/host. Takes some logistics prep in Zoom, but it will be great! Alternatively you can dial in guest speakers – much more easily than in person.
8. Conduct short but frequent plenary discussions. This helps keep the group together, even though you are not in the room. Keeping them short prevents fatigue, which often comes with large-group online discussions. Make sure to moderate forcefully. Or use a timer app to limit individual contributions. Our longest break-out session will be 30 minutes, and we have one nearly in every session.
9. Produce solutions in real-time. For this, we love using collaborative options like Google docs, or a document in MS Teams. Make sure to create a template up front with clear questions/headlines – basically a good structure for people to fill in. In our case, we ask for thoughts on how our client's transformation plan needs an update based on the insights from the org pulse check earlier in the day. We give 4 headlines: What to stop? What to intensify? What to do start? How to change the timeline? In round 1, people only type in their ideas. In round 2, they read each other's ideas and start structuring them. Then we do a plenary discussion. Workshop participants love this efficiency so much, that we started doing this even in face-to-face workshops.
10. Delegate work packages. In a face-to-face workshop it feels good to use the group energy to bring everything to a closure. Online, it is more okay to name things and delegate them. In this case, we will jointly find one person to craft a few communication bullets on what to communicate to the organization regarding the workshop outcomes. This person will then circulate those bullets a few days later to the LT and everyone starts communicating. It's a great exercise in trust, and online people are more willing to practice followership as they want to avoid inefficient large group online discussions.

In addition, we will course make sure to adhere to the standard recommendations for video conferencing (video always on, take time to practice technology, etc.).

New sample agenda for a 2x half-day workshop

Here's our solution. We haven't delivered this yet, but our client already loves it:

The "state of the union" (they love calling it that way) of course now also includes a coronavirus update.

You can do it!

We hope this gives you an idea of how it is possible to transform your strategy retreat into a really fun, meaningful and efficient online format that produces excellent results. The online workshop itself will be shorter, but your preparation time might become longer. Overall it is still a massive efficiency gain.

And: the above principles apply in similar ways to large-group events. You can even take your global management meeting of 300+ people online. It will get even shorter, but people will be very grateful to stay connected in times of crisis.

If you have insights to share, please comment or message me. And if you want to know more or need help with your planned workshop or offsite, make sure to reach out. We have a lot of (online) tricks up our sleeves here at LEAD, and sharing is caring.