How it works

Using the right technology for the right purpose is often the key. However while technology is a great enabler, there’s much more involved in facilitating online gatherings, like keeping the attention of everyone involved, ensuring equal contributions and establishing clear agreements on the relevant outcomes.

‍Remote Facilitation: Engage us to design and facilitate an engaging remote event for you & your team, or a group of stakeholders‍
Tech Coaching: We can teach you how to use the best, most suitable technology so you can facilitate remotely yourself‍
Tech Support: Get help and guidance in transforming your physical event into a remote one with tech support from us on the day

The Benefits of Remote Workshops

There is growing evidence that in several ways, effectively-run virtual offsites and meetings may be superior to in-person meetings.

LESS COGNITIVE BIASES: In many meetings, decisions taken will be in line with the HIPPO, or “highest-paid person's opinion”. In virtual meetings however, participants are more comfortable openly disagreeing with leaders, which can lead to more productive discussion and often better outcomes (Olsen et al., 2017; Bloom et. al., 2014).

MORE INCLUSIVITY: Virtual workshops offer the opportunity for reduced physical considerations such as age and gender - for example by introducing anonymous contributions and voting, and even removing some of the more obvious visual cues experienced in a physical meeting. This can, when managed appropriately, level the playing field (Chen, 2020; Dailey-Hebert & Dennis, 2014).

BETTER TURN-TAKING: With effective facilitation, it’s easier to encourage equal turn-taking in virtual meetings. In our experience participants are much more used to waiting for each other to finish talking before speaking themselves. This enables fuller sharing and reduces the risk of more senior or outspoken participants ‘running the show’ and shouting down others.

Sample Outlines

You might like one of these "off the shelf" workshops, or we can use one as a starting point to create a bespoke workshop to suit your group.

Teamwork

Quality Service

Here's what you can expect when you work with us:

Zoom & Microsoft Teams

We can use Zoom and Microsoft Teams to successfully replicate many areas of our face-to-face workshops. We use both apps to organise breakout groups when appropriate, and also utilise chat functions for sharing links & files and fielding questions. We don't charge for use of our Zoom & Teams accounts.

Visual Whiteboards

We bring many of our meetings and workshops to life with collaborative visual activities, like whiteboards and post-it notes. For remote sessions we replicate this experience using tools such as MURAL, Miro, Jamboard and more, where you can post virtual sticky notes and write on virtual whiteboards together.

Virtual Facilitation

We're increasingly invited to work with remote teams and participants working from home. Once you’re comfortable using virtual workshop software, the usual principles of running a great workshop or meeting apply: we create carefully designed, high energy events that help people generate ideas, solve problems, share opinions and make decisions.

Expert Facilitation

When the day comes, we’ll carefully and skilfully guide your participants through a series of sessions and discussions to achieve your aims. We design sessions to keep the engagement and energy high, making sure everyone gets the chance to contribute. We’ll wrap up with key points and actions, and can record everything in a report afterwards if required.

Full Engagement

Our meetings and workshops get everyone collaborating equally and effectively to harness their collective strengths and make insightful contributions. They’re carefully designed experiences that help people of all kinds speak up, generate ideas, solve problems, share opinions and make decisions.

Tangible Outcomes

We'll work closely with you to understand the outcomes you need from the session and work towards these, to help you drive your project forward with key deliverables, decisions, stakeholder support, actions, measurement criteria, roles, responsibilities and deadlines.

Great Collaboration

We'll get your group working together effectively

Team Communication

Establish rules and best practices for delegation, feedback and knowledge sharing within the team.

Working Effectively

Prioritise and schedule work together, focus intently and be a master of meetings and project planning.

Team Spirit

Help your team support each other and feel invested in reaching ambitious goals together.

Read about our approach to group dynamics

Tools & Techniques

We can draw from a variety of approaches to help you achieve your objectives. Here are just a few examples:

Great Teams

An interactive session based on Google’s Project Aristotle research, which revealed the importance of ‘psychological safety’ and other factors as key ingredients to effective teams. A great introduction to teamwork best practice.

Scenario Planning

Events will shape the future in many different ways, and it’s impossible to predict everything that will happen tomorrow, let alone 5 or 10 years in the future. One way to deal with this is to use Scenario Planning, first introduced by energy giant Shell in the 1970s.

Team Canvas

Team Canvas is a comprehensive framework that brings team members onto the same page, by examining team purpose, values, goals, activities, strengths and weaknesses. It is made to align teams, increase cohesion and create productive team culture, fast.

Review all our tools and techniques