 In this video, you're going to learn all the things you need to consider before, during and after a remote workshop to make it a success and ensure solid outcomes. And as you watch this video, let us know in the comments below if you have any questions about remote facilitation or any difficulties that you faced while running remote workshops and we'll make sure to answer them. Now, let's look at the step by step process you need to do before your workshop kicks off. One extremely important thing to remember is that you need to put in the time to prepare for your workshop, just like you wouldn't try to wing a normal in-person workshop or so we hope you shouldn't try to wing a remote workshop. Sure, you don't need to prepare the physical room, but you need to take care of your participants before the workshop starts and properly onboard them. And these are the exact steps we do at AsianSmart to onboard our remote workshop participants. Step number one, send an onboarding email and please, please, please, please never, ever skip this step. It might be super tempting to just fly over the remote collaboration tool features at the beginning of the workshop, but here's the thing. Everyone has a different learning span and learning mechanics and some of the participants might not understand what you want from them at the beginning of the workshop and this will just stall your progress or someone will not feel comfortable speaking up and this will just result in so much mess down the road. So to avoid that, send a clear and concise onboarding emails where we will introduce the tools you're going to be using, some of the basic features the participants need to know and how to log into the tool. And by the way, we share all of the templates we use in our client work in our remote design sprint masterclass and if you're interested, definitely check out the link below. Step number two, talk to the decider. Every good workshop has a decider and a decider is usually a project owner or CEO or the main decision maker when it comes to the subject of your workshop. Do not skip the step because the decider has the power to stop your workshop in its tracks. Schedule a call with them and take that time to really get down to the root of their problem. What are they expecting from the workshop? What are their challenges? What do they want to get out of it? Also use this time to let the decider ask questions to you, like how is the workshop going to be structured and what are the exact steps and how they can prepare. And pro tip, if you want to be really prepared for the workshop and really have that wow effect on the whole team, record these calls for later reference and re-watch them a few times. Step number three, build connection with the team. Building mutual trust between the facilitator and the participants of the workshop is crucial because this will define how smoothly your workshop will go and how good the outcomes will be. I know it's more challenging to do in a remote setting, but don't give up before you even start it. Schedule a call with every participant or with participants as a group or include a little bit more icebreakers at the start of the workshop and try to really get to know their team. What are their challenges? What are they hoping to get out of the workshop? What are their personal interests? This will really help you as a facilitator to make the workshop more fun and collaborative and engaging to be in. So how we do it here at Agent Smart is depending on the size of a group and their availability before the workshop, we either schedule one-on-one sessions with each participant or we schedule a group call with the whole group or we just make sure to include more buffer time and breaks to engage with them in a non-formal way. Tip number four is to test everything and by everything, I mean everything. Every little piece of technology used in your workshop needs to be tested. Make sure your remote collaboration board looks the same on all of the browsers. Make sure that all of your video conferencing tools work just fine. Test your microphone, test your headphones, test your presentation slides, everything. So if you run an internal workshop, this might not be that important, even though it will make your workshop feel a bit messy, but you know, it will be fine. Your colleagues will understand, but if you're a freelancer or an agency running workshops as a service, this will really undermine your expertise and will really make you look unprofessional. So don't skip this step and test everything. Tip number five, have a plan B for everything. And by this, I don't mean a contingency plan because we've already covered that. What I mean is don't be married to your tools. It might so happen that a new client of yours or a new team you'll be working with is not allowed to use Zoom or they're not allowed to use Mural or Mural or whatever it might be. Different companies in different countries have different regulations, so be ready to be flexible and just have a plan prepared in case you can't use your preferred tools. Tip number six, hone your facilitation skills. Your confidence and the way you present yourself as a facilitator can really make or break the workshop and don't think that you can bring it or fake it until you make it or hide it. If you are not confident in your facilitation skills, it will show and participants will feel it and they will be reluctant to follow your guidance. So take the time and hone your facilitation skills. Before you start the workshop, go through your facilitation checklist, reread how to deal with troublemakers, check again how to park circular discussions. Just read through your facilitation manual and this will make you feel much more prepared for the workshop. And if you're looking for a manual that you can reference before the start of every workshop where you actually have a free facilitation guidebook, you can download it by clicking on the link below. Tip number seven, set up your workspace the right way. So when you facilitate a remote workshop, a good old laptop or just single screen is not good enough. We highly recommend that you do two screens at a time so you'd have your remote collaboration tool on one screen and then your video conferencing tools and all your chat tools on the other screen. This way you can see all of your participants at the same time and check if they look disengaged or if it seems like they have some technical problems. And at the same time, you can keep your eye on the remote collaboration board and see what's going on there and you won't need to switch between the two and break up your flow as a facilitator. And our final step in the pre-workshop checklist is to prepare the online collaboration board the right way. The entire remote workshop relies on how well your digital collaboration tool works and also how you've designed them and how comfortable participants are with it. It's literally the backbone of how well your workshop will run. So invest some time in preparing it the right way. We recommend that you avoid jumping back and forth between the workshop slide deck and between the remote collaboration tool because this will make your participants feel scattered, it will confuse them and it will just break up the flow of the workshop and tools like Neuro actually allow you to embed your workshop slide deck into the remote collaboration wide board. So we really suggest you make use of that feature. The way you set up your wide board space will also have an influence on how overwhelmed or engaged your participants will be. So really take the time and design your board intuitively. Make use of progressive disclosure. Don't overwhelm your participants with thousands of different graphics and boards and spaces. The way we do it at Agen Smart is that we cover up the parts of the board that we're not using just yet so the participants only ever see the exercise they work on at the moment. And if you haven't had enough time to tweak and experiment with your remote collaboration tool setup, we actually have two really nice templates in the Mirrorverse library. They're free for you if you're a member of the Mirror team and you can also check them out by clicking on the link below. Now on to the things you have to do during the workshop. It's show time. And if you followed our advice from the previous section and went through all of the steps, you should be prepared and you should be able to focus 100% on the facilitation instead of fixing little bits and pieces. So what are some of the things that you have to focus on? Remote facilitation principle number one is bring in the energy. Now energy is a key component and in-person facilitation as well but with the remote setting it's even more important to take it into account and really exaggerate it and really give it your all. If you don't do that, you run the risk of your participants disengaging and slipping into the normal conference mood and just not bringing their A game. So one way to avoid that is to really exaggerate the amount of energy you bring in. And let me tell you, it will feel weird and you will feel awkward because you're probably going to be the only person in your room shouting at your monitor while all of the other participants are on mute. But while this will feel extremely weird on your side, this will feel extremely energizing and rewarding for your participants. Remote facilitation principle number two. Always, always, always start with an icebreaker. Like we've already mentioned before, it's important to get your participants into the right state of mind, into the right headspace and by including icebreakers into your workshop schedule, you will allow them to switch from the normal work mode into the workshop work mode. An icebreaker we absolutely love here at Agent Smart is called What's Your First Job? And the way you do it is you pair your participants and you let them ask each other what was their first job and what they learned from it. And the reason we love it is because this works equally well whether the participants know each other well or if they don't. And it's an icebreaker that's safe across multiple cultures and it really gets the group into the right headspace and it works equally well with remote and in-person setting. Remote collaboration principle number three is that you have to take care of creating a collaborative atmosphere. To do that, put in some work should be music because this will really allow your workshop participants to feel less lonely and awkward. I mean just imagine they're sitting in their offices or in their homes all alone by themselves in front of a computer and especially if they're working on an exercise alone without communicating with their teammates which is most of the exercises in a workshop or setting that will feel lonely and awkward for them. A lot of remote collaboration tools and video conferencing tools allow you to share your music so take advantage of that and every time you start an exercise put in some non-distracting workshoppy music. If you don't know which playlist to choose we actually have a public Spotify playlist with our favorite workshop beats. The link is in the description below. Principle number four make your workshops shorter. Now it might be tempting to try to squeeze everything in and do all of the exercises in as short a amount of time as possible but this is never a good idea. Actually in person workshops also shouldn't feel too cramped but especially in a remote setting it's important you pay attention to how much time you spend in front of a screen. A general rule of thumb here at Aegean Smart is that we keep our remote workshops to under four hours including breaks and buffer time so realistically you should be able to finish earlier. This is important because sitting in front of a screen for the whole day is going to be disengaging and your participants just won't be able to pay attention so you won't get their A game out of them. Another thing would recommend is to include way more breaks into your workshop planning than you would in an in-person workshop. So for reference here at Aegean Smart for an in-person workshop we try to include a break every 90 or so minutes for the remote workshop which reduced that time to maybe 50 or 60 minutes. Remote facilitation principle number five is to encourage video conferencing. It's not a secret that seeing other people on video makes you feel more engaged there's nothing worse than the feeling of tuning into the Zoom call and all of your colleagues just having a still image there. It's harder to connect and especially in a workshop setting it's important to connect to your participants so encourage your participants to turn the video on. Now some people might not be completely comfortable with that so make sure to include this step in your onboarding process and make sure to set this expectation early on. What this will also help you to do is make sure that participants actually take the time to find a quiet space where they can concentrate on the workshop instead of dialing in on the go or while commuting. Remote facilitation principle number six is to try and get a co-facilitator if you can. Now you of course can try to go edit on your own and this is possible and we have done this as well but what we found really skyrocketed the quality of our remote workshops is to have two facilitators. So one facilitator who is actually managing the team and explaining the exercises and is guiding the team through the workshop step by step and a second tech facilitator who checks whether the remote collaboration tools work as they're supposed to, checks the video, checks the internet connection basically all of the tech aspects and what that allows you to do is to be 100% focused on the facilitation instead of being spread thin between managing the collaboration wide board and the tools and the actual exercises. Remote collaboration principle number seven is to sort out the tech. I know I mentioned this multiple times in a video but honestly this can never be said often enough have a contingency plan for everything, everything. Principle number eight is to buffer in more time for discussions. In an in-person setting you can usually usher the group along and cut some time back on our exercises and generally move faster but in a remote setting that's a bit too risky and we would recommend you don't do that instead, always ask your participants for permission to move along to the next exercise to make sure everyone is on board. You can say things like, hey guys, follow me along on the board or is it okay if we move on to the next exercise? Things like that. What this will allow you to do is make sure no one is left behind on the digital collaboration board and everyone is being taken along for the ride. One important thing to keep in mind is that you need to buffer in more time in your workshop planning. Like I said before, don't try to cram in too much. This will only backfire on the quality of your workshop. Keep in mind that remote discussions just take more time like I mentioned before. There are some non-verbal cues that are missing. That doesn't mean you cannot cut circular discussions out but allow more time for people to get their point across. And congrats! You've successfully facilitated your workshop if you followed all of our steps. Now there's just one more thing to do and that is to summarize and report on your workshop's outcomes. This will help you make sure that the participants leave the workshop with a nice feeling and with a sense of accomplishment. So take the time to summarize the workshop. One of the most important rules of facilitation is to start strong and end even stronger. And how I like to do this at AJ & Smart is at the end of the workshop after every exercise has been completed. What we do is we ask every participant to zoom out and to look at the online collaboration-wide board and to let it sink in how much work they've done and how much exercises they got accomplished and which huge body of work they just did. What it does is that it gives the participants this very nice feeling, feeling of accomplishment, feeling that they got something done. We also like to ask them what their main takeaway is or what they learned from the workshop and how they're generally feeling. We find that reflection time is generally a very nice way to wrap up a workshop. Also, make sure to properly hand over the outcomes. So how we like to do it here at AJ & Smart is we normally schedule a handover call where we talk the team and they decide our step by step through all of the decisions and outcomes of the workshop and then we also summarize them in a report and we do a handover presentation. What that ensures is that the results of the workshop actually get implemented and that is good for you as a facilitator because the team will actually see the end outcomes and they're more likely to reach out to you again when they need help on solving another challenge or problem. And there you have it! This is our ultimate guide, all of the step-by-step things you need to keep in mind when you facilitate a remote workshop and we're confident that if you implement this process as well, your remote facilitation will feel just buttery smooths and confident and will deliver the outcomes that you want for your team. To sum it up, to ensure solid outcomes, don't stress about the things you can't control and really prep yourself on the things that you can. Good luck with your remote workshopping and let us know in the comment box below if you have any more questions about remote facilitation we'll answer them on our socials and here on YouTube. Now, we'll see you in the next video. Bye!