How do you keep people engaged in online workshops?

Full transcript

Intro

In these videos, I share tips and ideas and answer questions about challenges that we face as facilitators.

Now in this day and age where the majority of our facilitation is happening online and virtually, there is one question I get over and over again. When we're running online workshops, how do we keep people engaged?

Today’s question

How do we keep people motivated, inspired, awake, in our sessions and sprints and workshops?

Let's dig into it. So the truth is, it's hard enough to keep people engaged and paying attention, when we're doing our meetings and workshops in person. 

Gets so much harder when we're doing these things online and virtually because people have a lot more propensity and ease of turning off their cameras, disengaging, checking email, doing other work, just all together checking out of the conversation.

If this were an in person meeting that you were running, be pretty obvious if somebody fell asleep at their desk or stood up and walked out of the conference room. So what that means is you just have to work harder as a facilitator, prepare to keep people motivated and engage, because it's totally possible to run an online workshop or meeting where everyone is connected, engaged, having a great conversation.

It's just gonna take more work for you. I've got a few tips that you can try to experiment and work into your upcoming sessions. Number one, start ahead of time. Of course, the answer to most of the things that I talk about in these series is to do work before the actual topic comes to be.

So, when you're preparing for your workshops and your sprints, don't wait until you're in the session itself to figure out if you've got the right people in the room. Do that work ahead of time. Because the majority of the reason that people check out of a conversation or workshop is because they don't belong there or they don't understand what the topic is all about. 

So they just turn, they tune out all together. So make sure you have the right people in the room, make sure they're prepared and understand what the topic is about. Then, once you have that team together, design your sessions to be as short as humanly possible. So if you have a session that you do, that would take a full day in person and you could take breaks and you're gonna have lunch together, you're gonna go for a walk together, design that to be two, four hour sessions or three, two hour sessions, whatever it can be, break it down into small chunks.

People will really appreciate that. Nobody, my kids hate being on their Zoom calls for school. Adults feel the same way. So whatever you're doing online and virtually make it much shorter and condensed and break it down over multiple sessions instead of one long session. And then idea number three, within your shorter sessions design the breaks that you're gonna take. Not just design them in the agenda, but design what to do during those breaks.

Because if all that you say is, okay, we've got five minutes, be back, go get some coffee, go to the bathroom and report back because the next thing on the agenda is X, that's stressful, it's not exciting, nobody wants to be thinking about that. They're on a break just to like cut loose from the agenda and to not be thinking about that. So one thing I like to give folks to do while on a break is give them a prompt, something fun and lighthearted, something to think about. If you can relate it back to the conversation, great, but something just to free them up, free their thinking, something that will inspire them to come back and share what they thought about.

You could also pair people up to have a conversation about the prompt you came up with or put them in trios. Again, it just gives people a reason to come back and share what they thought about. And one little tip in there, when you design your breaks, don't just leave it as, be back in five minutes, make it specific so that everyone arrives, cameras on, ready to go at this specific time. And finally, don't make it just your job to keep people engaged, make it everybody's job. One little tip you can do to do that is, when people are sharing in groups, especially larger group share outs.

One little thing I like to do is the last person to share, chooses the next person to go. It's a little bit of popcorn style. It keeps everybody on their toes, but it also gives everybody a small facilitation job to choose the next person that's gonna share. Human beings are growing more and more distracted. Our attention is pulled in a million different directions.

Work has us balancing 10 different projects at any given time, asking people to focus on your topic, your conversation, your workshop, while everything is happening in the background of their house or wherever else they are in your online session is really hard. So, work hard at it, use these tips, keep people engaged, make it fun, make it something that they're appreciating and want to contribute to the conversation.

I hope these tips are helpful. Stick around in a couple of weeks.

We'll have our tenth video in the series of Facilitator's Q&A With Jay, until then, take care. See you soon.

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