One key decision you'll make about a workshop is how to deliver it. Just like the activities you choose, this should be a deliberate choice, as it will impact the value you create.
In this issue, we'll discuss some of the key benefits and drawbacks of remote, in-person, and hybrid workshops.
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In-Person Workshops
Definition:
Traditional gatherings where participants are all physically present in one location simultaneously.
Benefits:
Inter-personal relationship building: Establish and grow stronger connections through side conversations and direct contact.
Tangibility: Ability to interact with physical materials, which feel valuable and intentional to collaborators, increasing attention and keeping people engaged
Environmental control: Lighting, music, seating, access to technology, pre- and post-activities, food, and snacks are all within your gift. You can choreograph an entire environment to make your workshop as effective as possible.
Facilitator Visibility: It's easy to observe the room and adjust the session on the fly, noting how people are responding to the activities and activities. You can also quickly directly intervene in a conversation or draw someone to the side without it feeling forced.
Drawbacks:
Expensive: High travel, material, and logistics costs can be difficult for stakeholders to swallow.
Time-consuming: Along with the financial outlay, there might be opportunity costs. The time lost to travel, especially when companies come together across the country or the world, can be difficult to manage. If you're working with senior teams, it can often be challenging to organise an entire group of people away from comms at the same time.
Early lock-down time for print work: Last-minute paintwork is expensive and stressful, so you'll need to finalise canvases and any printed materials at least two full working days ahead of the session.
Good use cases:
Kickoff sessions for new projects where relationships between collaborators are untested or unforged.
Political discussions or potentially contentious decisions where maintaining civility and open communication might be a challenge
Complex collaborations with multiple angles for consideration or assets to be created. Working in a "war room" with all the materials produced during a collaboration creates visual references with deep shared meaning within the co-creators.
Collaborations in which an individual session might run for more than a few hours. Being together within a controlled environment also means that distractions and context switching are often managed, energy can be more effectively monitored, and energy can more effectively be built back up
Remote Workshops
Definition
Participants join from different locations using video conferencing tools.
Benefits:
Global Reach: Ideal for bringing together geographically dispersed teams.
Many clients and teams are dispersed physically. A remote workshop allows you to bring them together into a single virtual space, even people who can't travel
Accessibility: Participants with physical or other barriers are included.
This can be a double-edged sword because whilst it can be very tempting to say it's remote, it's online; therefore, everyone can join, but that doesn't necessarily make it inclusive.
You can also design remote workshops to work with screen readers and to work with various tools that people need in order to engage with it. This is hard to do because the tooling isn't set up for it; but you should do your best.
You can allow more time for thinking. You can leave the boards open before and after your sessions so that people who are uncomfortable speaking or don't feel psychologically safe can do so afterwards.
Time Efficient: No travel is required, making scheduling more straightforward and flexible.
Remote workshops don't require travel or other arrangements, meaning it'll save your participant's time. It also gives you flexibility around running smaller sessions with time in between for you or collaborators to do individual work, research and development.
Pre- and post-engagement: You can allow collaborators more time than just the time in the session to interact with the materials.
People often have a "shower thought" where they're winding down a few hours later and suddenly think of something they wish they'd said. With a remote workshop, you can very easily leave your collaborative space open for people to rejoin and add further thoughts and feedback
Diverse Participation: Involves a more representative group in co-creation sessions.
Remote workshops are much easier to schedule and organise for external people to drop in to. It could be some users who will join to critique some ideas or a data specialist who will join for twenty minutes to field questions on a specific topic.
Drawbacks:
Technical Challenges: Requires onboarding participants onto tools, which can be intimidating.
You will likely use tools like Zoom or Teams and an interactive platform like Miro or Figjam. You will need to bake in tutorial time, and even then, you'll need to provide support and guidance continually. Make sure your collaborators can access any tools you're going to use. There can be firewall/access issues from blanket IT policies down to machine capability and internet stability issues
These tools are complex and can be intimidating for people who don't use them regularly, and because it's hard to "back channel" tech issues, even minor problems can be really disruptive.
Single Conversation Limitation: You can only have one conversation at a time unless using breakout rooms.
The nature of most major video conferencing tools creates a formal one-at-a-time communication situation, which focuses on discussion or debate and makes informal dialogue incredibly hard. There is no real chance for watercooler moments, no spotting someone from across the room or whispering to the person sitting next to you. This hinders team bonding and participation from quiet people who don't have the chance to communicate their thoughts and opinions indirectly via an amplifier.
Lack of unique context: People treat remote workshops as part of a standard working day. They will book meetings up to the start and roll right into their next meeting immediately after. That means you need time for them to context switch, settle and engage with the subject within the session. They'll also likely be responding to messages or dealing with other things during the session itself, meaning you're losing the value they could bring, and they're losing the chance to collect general insight to use in other places.
Good use cases:
Sessions with participants spread out geographically.
Quick, investigative workshops where you're exploring something new and might want to add more research ahead of a follow-up session.
Follow-up workshops, in which everyone already knows each other and is comfortable with the subject. When you're more into the process and have done the hard graft, remote can enable an existing team to engage quickly and efficiently to push a project on.
Hybrid Workshops
TLDR: Hybrid workshops add value to very specific use cases. However, they will require a lot of planning, total confidence in your approach, and a little luck.
Definition:
A mix of in-person and remote collaborators, where a single person might be online or only a small group of people in person.
Benefits:
Combines Some Strengths: Flexibility for remote participation of experts or other people who can provide specific value in parts of the process
Can make a workshop more accessible
Drawbacks:
Facilitation Complexity: Managing multiple locations (including online) really requires multiple facilitators working as a team. You'll also need a constant back channel of communication between the facilitators to come to a clear consensus on how the approach emerges. If one team takes things off in a different direction, it'll have a knock-on impact when you compare outputs.
Exclusion Risk: One group can easily dominate the conversation, excluding the other. As a facilitator, you need to be hyper-aware of getting each team and each person to feed into the wider conversation. You risk creating the one-person-at-a-time situation of remote workshops. Groups who are physically together can often rail-road or take ownership of a conversation simply because it is easier for them to time their intervention in someone else statements by following body language. Remote joiners can be slightly reticent to engage because they often boom out of speakers in the conference room in a "voice of god" situation.
Intensive Planning: Requires meticulous planning and execution to ensure all groups are engaged and produce comparable outputs. Because the approach you'd take to solve a challenge is defined in part by whether you're remote or in person, the most effective approach for a hybrid workshop will be a blend of the two, which can give you the worst of both worlds or two entirely separate workshops approaches to run simultaneously
Good use cases:
Multi-site company workshops, in which you want each site to work as a team, feeding into a central "process". This enables the site-based teams to have the bonding benefits of an in-person session but gives controlled visibility and collaboration with the other teams. Your lead facilitator will need to be based somewhere, probably with the largest of most difficult "team", and will need to manage the event from that location with the help of co-facilitators
Bringing external subject matter insight into specific workshop activities. When I run co-creation workshops, I often bring in business and customer SMEs to provide their thoughts or present their research. Allowing them to join remotely makes it much easier to engage and also gives them the (otherwise negative) "voice of god", keeping people's attention.
In summary!
In-Person Workshops:
Choose in-person workshops when you need to build or support a strong team rapport.
Remote Workshops:
Opt for remote workshops when you need to bring together geographically dispersed participants or when you require quick, focused sessions.
Hybrid Workshops:
Consider hybrid workshops for multi-site company workshops, where each site works as a team and feeds into a central process, or to remotely bring in subject matter experts to an in-person session for specific activities.
That’s all for today!
So, each type of workshop has its place and contexts in which it can add the most value. Sometimes, you'll be forced to use one type of workshop regardless of the benefits of using another, and that's just part of facilitation. You'll sometimes need to roll with the punches and work out how to achieve as much as possible within the constraints of that format.
Continuing from this issue, the next three will be a checklist of things to consider for each workshop type.
I hope that's been useful, and until next time, Happy Facilitating.
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