How to run a remote workshop
And not getting lost in a non-productive 4-hours call in the process
Times have changed, and the home office is a reality we need to face, with its perks and its cons. Anyways, today we are not here to talk about the home office but to talk about how to keep things moving remotely.
As a Product Manager, I recently faced the challenge of running my first workshop remotely. I've previously attended to some long calls trying to run a workshop while, for example, one participant was moderating with a whiteboard at home, and the rest were collaboratively working on some Google Docs.
This kinda didn't make the trick to me, or at least I didn't feel the same level of collaboration, proactivity, and efficiency I like to see on a workshop. It didn't feel real enough. So my goal was to try to avoid that when I was running my next workshop.
Set your workshopper environment
First of all, you need to decide on what kind of workshop you'll be running. This will define what kind of environment you should be setting for yourself as the workshopper.
In my case, I will be running a Lighting Decision Jam, if you want to know more about it here is an article, it's a workshop exercise you can use to solve almost anything.
So, time to check what platforms we have to run it. You can probably use any collaborative tool in the market, from Google Slides to Miro. I decided for Miro as it's a tool nurtured for this, it feels like a really natural use case.
As a first instance, you should prepare your materials. I recommend you to create a block where you have one of each important thing you will need to run the workshop.
And I would also recommend you to create your different types of whiteboard templates you'll need across the workshop, so you can easily switch between them while running your workshop.
Don't be shy and prepare all the boards you'll need, as probably it's a good idea to not run too many exercises over the same board, by switching to a new one you can keep that sense of dynamism and how stuff is moving on (also some traceability).
Now we have our workshopper environment ready to run this workshop, in this case, I also needed a stopwatch but I solved it by using a Miro embedded stopwatch.
Set your participants environment
As you might have noticed in the last picture, I've also added a Participant Desk. What is it about? Well, it's quite simple, each participant will need its materials, and its space to work freely.
By doing this you are giving them a place where they can feel safe, and to not be worried about overriding some other colleague work. You should place all that they might need across the entire workshop here, from sticky notes to voting dots.
This will also allow you to control for example, what kind of sticky notes they'll be using for each exercise. Or the amount and colours of voting points for each phase. Besides the fact of taking away one concern from the participants, as they will know they have everything they need right there, sot hey can focus on the workshop itself.
Set your live workshop environment
And now it's time to set your live workshop environment, something I would recommend you is to always show the participants the essential things they need to be focusing on.
For example, at the beginning of the workshop. You should show them just their desks, explain the reason for each element they can see, and after that when you run into your first exercise you can introduce the first whiteboard template.
Then keep adding the rest of the templates in an organic way, basically the same way you'll do it in a real-life situation where you have a couple of whiteboards and you are moving around presenting new exercises.
Be sure to have quick access to your resources so you don't lose time for example by adding the template you'll need for your next exercise. I tried to imagine it as it should take the same time as the time it takes to flip a whiteboard to make a new side appear to the scene.
Things to take into consideration
And to finish with it, some small insights I could get from running remote workshops. Feel free to add more!
Before the workshop
- Check all the participants have access to the tool where you'll run the workshop on, you need to mitigate any technical risk.
- Be sure to have a clear goal for the workshop, this is something you should always do, but I think on remote workshops it's even more important.
During the workshop
- Explain to all the participants how the tool works and the different interactions you can do on the platform, how to add new information, who's entitled to modify or move each element.
- Try to get all participants on video, and use it to generate better interactions. Keep the environment as formal/informal you would do it in a face to face workshop.
- Don't overwhelm the participants with a lot of information, introduce each element when it's required.
- Give each participant their own space where they can freely move and edit, and then set a different space where the collaborative work will happen.
I’m also adding a screenshot of how does a finished workshop looks like from my side. Hope you found it useful and it helped you to run a more efficient remote workshop with your team.
Hi, I’m Mariano. I’m a Systems Engineer working as Product Manager in Berlin. You can contact me via LinkedIn, Twitter, or mcocirio.com
