7 Lessons from my first All-Virtual Workshop
I just wrapped up my first fully virtual four-day design workshop. My neck is sore from staring into the web cam, but I want to share my biggest lessons learned while the experience is fresh in my mind. As someone who is most comfortable running an in-person workshop, I had to learn a lot of new tricks. I hope these tips will help you in your all-remote sessions.
For the workshop, we had three facilitator roles: lead facilitator, tech lead, and attendance lead. My co-facilitator, Ryan, worked tirelessly in the role of tech lead, ensuring templates were ready, setting up meeting rooms, and making sure permissions were enabled for everyone to participate. Our team Program Manager, Denise, fielded messages from attendees who needed to step out for an escalation or to take care of things at home. She managed these exits and re-entries to minimize disruption. So, if I asked, “Dave, what do you think?” Denise could say, “Dave had to step away briefly,” instead of all of us waiting in silence for Dave to reply.
Leverage the tools you have. At PayPal, we use enterprise tools vetted by our Information Security team. This includes Microsoft Teams for all corporate meetings. Microsoft Teams has many capabilities, but one feature I wish it had was a simple way of splitting a large meeting into smaller breakout groups. Our 40-person workshop required six small breakout groups for a few exercises throughout the week. With a little research, Ryan found an excellent solution. He created a Microsoft Team for the workshop. Then inside the new team, he created six channels — one for each breakout group. We assigned people to groups before to the workshop, adding them to the channel for their group. We did have some challenges with this approach as we quickly found it was possible for groups to start more than one meeting. Ryan jumped in to get people on the same meeting. And to aid future breakout sessions, he added a link to each group’s meeting from our shared workspace.
Have a kickoff meeting at least a day in advance. Knowing that not everyone would be familiar with the tool we were using for our shared workspace (Miro), we scheduled a kickoff meeting on the Thursday before the week of the workshop. Prior to the kickoff, Ryan sent invitations to the 40 participants through Miro. Some people said they didn’t receive the invitation. With some troubleshooting we eventually realized the email invite had ended up in their spam folder.
Build exercises that help people practice with the tools. The kickoff meeting also allowed us to get a head start on learning Miro. We used a popular warmup exercise called “Two Truths and a Dream,” which requires participants to write three things about themselves — only two of which are true. This exercise is about more than getting to know one another, although you do learn some incredible things about your teammates! It allowed us to introduce the idea of creating notes, finding and moving objects, and using emojis to upvote ideas; all techniques we used in the days that followed.
When I’m facilitating an in-person workshop, I prepare and present instructional slides to help people follow along. The deck usually has the agenda, expectations, instructions and timing for each exercise. For the all-virtual workshop, it turned out to be better to build the instructions into the shared workspace. This way, groups could easily refer to the instructions as they were working on the board. To help with the timing of each exercise, and bring everyone back to the main meeting, we used the Miro timer. It plays a chime with a highly visible bouncing alert when time has ended.
Be ready for additional prep work. We used one Miro board for the workshop, creating workspaces for each day. The board looked like a large timeline, with every exercise for the day starting at the far left, and proceeding to the right. Each day’s timeline started below the prior day. This made it easy to see the upcoming exercises at a glance, as well as quickly refer back to prior exercises.
Just like IRL workshops, be ready to pivot. At the start of Day 3, our Director of Design raised an important issue. The participants were not set up to be successful in the next exercise. I had an impromptu sidebar conversation with the core product team while my co-facilitators lead participants in the warm-up. Quickly, we made the necessary changes without distracting the already engaged workshop participants. This pivot led to productive conversations and a big step forward in the exercise that followed.
Lastly, there are benefits of the all-virtual workshop, including the shared workspace. All of our participants enjoyed using Miro. Below is a list of their favorite benefits:
- No one needs to record all the notes at the end of the workshop
- Copy notes to the next exercise without destroying the prior one
- Change color and size to show importance
- No size limit — go as big as you need
- Templates make it clear where you’re going
- For some reason, collaborating in silence isn’t as awkward
A virtual workshop does take longer to prepare, and requires a committed team of facilitators. But it’s an incredibly rewarding experience when you can get teams to discuss, align, and build solutions collaboratively. I hope you take the opportunity to run an all-virtual workshop at your company soon. Please post questions if you would like any additional tips!
