 Remote workshops? Not easy, but they can be easier. In this video, our colleague Amer will share the easiest tricks we use here at AJ & Smart to make remote sessions more enjoyable and more effective for our clients. And I promise you, if you implement these tricks, your remote workshops will get instantly better. Homer. And if you want to learn even more about workshopping and facilitation, join our free facilitation community where hundreds of facilitators share their tips insights and resources. The link for that community is in the description below. Now on to those facilitation tips from Amer. Don't overcomplicate things. Now it's really easy to get carried away with the digital whiteboard tools like Muro and Mural and have a lot of elements and having people navigate up and down and left and right. You really want to keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate things. Just try to simulate a physical environment as much as possible to lower the learning curve for people, meaning you can have just a what looks like a whiteboard and then you can move horizontally as if you're walking in a room. Try to minimize the need for scrolling up or down or zooming in and out. Just ask people to zoom in at one level. Then all they have to do for the rest of the workshop is scroll right or left depending on your preference. And that's all they need to do. You should also set your participants at ease, especially if they haven't used one of these digital whiteboard tools before and tell them even though there are a lot of tools on the screen, a lot of buttons, you only really need a couple of them. They only need to know how to move a sticky note around, how to copy and paste, how to edit a note and how to vote. That's really all they need to know. They don't need to know about shapes or frames or whatever it is. So tell them don't worry about learning all of this. We'll tell you just the stuff that you need to know and set them at ease just so that they don't feel stress and feel like they have to learn this tool in addition to focusing on the workshop itself. We also make use of progressive disclosure and what that means is that we only share the information that participants need to know when they need to know it. So what we do is we cover off parts of the board that we're not going to get to for a while and we only reveal the current exercise and maybe the next exercise when we want to move to it. That way, even if someone wanders off on the board, they don't need to be overwhelmed by anything that we haven't talked about yet and they don't need to think about it just yet. Now, similarly to an in-person workshop, you also want to ask people to move for one place to another. Maybe you're standing at one whiteboard and you want them to move to another one or they're sitting at the table and you need them to come to the whiteboard. You need to do the same thing when you're facilitating a remote workshop. And that means just asking everyone to follow your cursor on the board and if you feel that that might be a little too hard for people to be panning around or if they don't hear you or if you're asking them to navigate to a faraway place on the board than where they were previously. What you could do is use a feature in something like Mural or Mural to summon people over to you but make sure that you tell people that you're going to do this just so that you don't yank them away from what they were doing unexpectedly which can be quite annoying. And so what you want to do is say like, hey everyone, could you please all follow my cursor and wait a few seconds for everyone to get there and if you feel like someone is still behind and you see their cursor has enjoined with the rest, you can say, okay everyone I'm just going to summon everyone to my position to make it easier for you to join the part that we're going to be talking about next. And I'm sorry I have to do this. It feels a little annoying. So if you ask for permission, apologize for forcibly making people join you. That will make it a lot less annoying when you do it. And people will expect that now you're moving them off from one point to another. And the last point you want to pay attention to is minimizing the need to switch between the video conferencing software and the whiteboard because that will just result in people getting out of sync with you eventually when you want them to be on the board. They're still in the zoom call and vice versa. So what we recommend is having a one third and two thirds layout where one third is a video call and two thirds is the whiteboard. That way people don't need to constantly switch between applications to see everyone in the room, which is important to feel like you're in a workshop and also having the whiteboard right in front of them to start an exercise or to follow you along the board. So take a little bit of time to think out your templates, have everything that you need to have in there without over complicating it in terms of the navigation and the zooming and having elements that people don't need to see. If you need them for your own reference, you can have them on a separate screen where participants don't need to see them so that you and your team can refer to them. For example, like facilitation notes or anything like that, but try to keep the board that the participants see as minimal as possible. And there you have it. Now you can apply these tips to your next remote workshops to make it instantly better. If you want to see even more videos like this, subscribe to our channel and hit that bell button to get notified about our next video. And if you have any more questions about workshop exercises or building your career as a facilitator, join our free facilitation community. The link for that is in the description below. If you want to learn how to manage energy in your remote workshops, check out the video that's on the screen right now. Thanks for watching. See you next time.