Designing virtual workshops

This toolkit is designed to help individuals to design high quality virtual meetings.

We firmly believe that good virtual meeting design isn’t all about technology, although it will help to have a grasp of the basics. The steps you go through to design virtual meetings are no different than face to face, but you need to be paying attention to how the experience will be different for people, in order to translate your expertise to a session that will work well virtually. 

We have identified five principles that are useful to consider:

This is an obvious one to start with, but it’s also something you can’t think enough about. Every session should have a clear objective of what you want to get from it. See the toolkit for questions to consider.

Designing engaging sessions is even more important when you’re working virtually.

If your meeting is designed to be collaborative, then your goal has to be that you will hear from everyone – either out loud, or in writing. It can be easy for a few voices to dominate and for others not be heard.

Only use open conversation for groups of 8 people of less.

Consider activities that allow everyone to be involved. In Q we draw heavily on Liberating Structures and the Q caps cards. These activities are purposefully designed to enable high quality collaboration. While most of them aren’t designed to be run virtually, we’ve been having increasing success in adapting these – and would encourage you to have a go. We’ll continue to share our experiences of doing this in the write ups to these workshops.

We are all experiencing video call fatigue. It can be a lot harder to hold your attention virtually. There are some simple things you can do such as limiting meeting time, scheduling breaks, paying attention to energy and experimenting with different formats, such as building in communal silent reading time.

In any virtual meeting, there will be a low tech and high tech way of running it.

When you’re planning to add extra technology and platforms into a meeting, make sure you’re really clear about what it’s adding, and that it’s worth the additional complications.

The platform that we use most in Q – beyond Zoom – is Miro. Miro is an online collaboration platform. It allows us adapt workshop activities to work well virtually. We used Miro in the last Rapid Learning and Improvement workshop, and we shared some info about in the meeting write up. There are other similar tools you can look at, such as Mural and Stormboard.

People often comment on the professional nature of Q and Q Lab events. We have this reputation, because we prepare. A lot.

This may not always be relevant to everyone’s context, but is something you should consider if you are demanding a lot in terms of the time commitment from others.