Staying collaborative in a time of physical distancing

Times like these require many of us to work from home, have zoom or phone calls instead of meetings and reduce human contact as much as possible. This may feel scary for many organisations, who rely on their staff, partners and customers to come together to collaborate and innovate. Based on my experience of facilitating innovation and Customer Experience workshops with distributed teams - here are my top 5 tips for running successful virtual workshops.

1. Get a good facilitator. This person should be a non-participants and is required to not hold physical but virtual space. This means that the challenge is less about getting everybody to contribute but getting everyone to understand and get comfortable with ‘how’ they can contribute and indicate when they are struggling. Cadence, sequence and timing of activities become crucial. You are less able to think on the fly so setting clear expectations, being unambiguous with instructions and identifying the right tools for collaboration outputs in your unique team context becomes vital to facilitate a workshop successfully. 
2. Prepare the details. Many people know how to facilitate workshops - few have explored how you can still hold space for conversations when you are not in the same room with people and you are unable to check-in, guide and enable one-on-one. Preparation to explore and familiarise yourself with your run sheet and set up of collaboration tools will be the make or break of your workshop. 
3. Extend your tool belt. In the absence of post-it’s and sharpies, whatcha gonna do? If there was ever a time for technology to shine, this is it! Think about what some of your corporate subscriptions already offer you, and explore what free/low charge tools you can add to the mix to achieve a specific outcome. Zoom is a great starting point. Did you know you can create virtual breakout rooms? And tools like Lean canvas, canva, lucid chart and Miro allow for simultaneous or sequential collaboration on different topics and with different formats. 
4. Documentation becomes a breeze. Here’s the upside, the documentation of the workshop is practically done for you! The focus becomes to bring things together into a single source of truth that people can continue to access and iterate. Powerpoint may not be the best here, as it’s static and can easily outdate. I’m personally a big fan of Miro. 
5. Enabling action. It’s important for everybody to understand immediately who is doing what and within which timeframes as there is less opportunity to ‘just ask a quick question’ or check in across the divider wall to see where others are at with their work once the workshop is over. This is where more ‘standard’ collaboration tools become really useful such as Slack and Trello. 

If you are looking for a facilitator for your next virtual workshop, or need help setting up virtual workshop capability in your organisation, get in touch!

Sarah works as a CX Mentor, Facilitator and Speaker and is passionate about creating conditions for customer advocates and human centred businesses to thrive. During her practice Sarah draws on her experience leading customer experience and change initiatives, starting and scaling in-house innovation teams, founding and growing a boutique design agency and building a nationwide design community from scratch. Keen to know more? Get in touch! [email protected] or +64 22 160 7024