Our experience and insight March 2020 Making virtual workshops work The document discusses lessons learned from facilitating successful virtual workshops. It provides tips for planning virtual workshops, such as preparing an agenda with assigned tasks, designing interactive activities, and having clear roles for coordinators. It also recommends setting expectations for participants, maintaining an outside-in perspective by involving customers and experts, facilitating like being in a physical room, and using technology tools to capture perspectives. An example agenda is provided that incorporated pre-reading, breakout groups, customer interviews, expert presentations, reflection, and implications discussions. The overall message is that with proper planning, virtual workshops can be an effective alternative to in-person sessions.

1. Customer-led Success
Our experience and insight March 2020
Making virtual
workshops work

2. 2
“It’s remarkable what can be achieved virtually
if you do it properly”
• Whether it’s aligning around strategic choices, creatively developing new propositions or reviewing and
redesigning customer experiences a well planned and executed virtual workshop can be an effective way to
achieve your goals
• We have significant experience of designing and facilitating such sessions, necessitated historically by bad
weather conditions (thank you beast from the east) and more recently the Corona virus outbreak
• Through trial and error we’ve learnt what it takes to do this successfully, with teams from 4 all the way up to 25,
using a range of technology solutions and ways of working, including hearing directly from customers and
experts as well as working live with designers to bring ideas to life
• The rest of this deck describes our most important lessons so far which we’ll no doubt keep adding to in coming
weeks and months
“What a belter you helped deliver
yesterday! Totally awesome in every
way. Organised to perfection. A new era
of virtual collaboration is here to stay I
think”’ – Global Head of Strategic
Customer Marketing at a global bank
“This is great, it’s brilliant, we
should always work like this… we
don’t need to cancel anything
[workshops, projects etc]” –
Head of International Banking at
a global bank
“It’s remarkable what can be
achieved virtually if you do it
properly” – founder at a strategic
brand consultancy
Recentclientfeedback:

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1. Before - prepare for the worst, practice
to be your absolute best
Plan, plan, plan
You’ll need an agenda that details exactly who will do what and when, more so than for a
physical workshop. Assign every single task to a person from the opening of sessions, to the
giving of instructions, and have a quick practice run beforehand.
Design to be deliberately interactive
Video conferencing can make it difficult to balance ‘broadcasting’ and ‘interacting’, so
deliberately design for the latter by: encouraging reactions, using ice breakers, limiting
length of any presentation materials and using smaller moderated groups.
Clear roles – including a central coordinator and ‘master of ceremonies’
Have a single person leading the workshop overall (like a master of ceremonies) to keep
everything on track and also have a central coordinator to run things in the background and
field any issues from participants. An organisers’ Whatsapp group also works well to
coordinate.
One navigation document to reduce screen swapping
Have a single navigation deck to help steer the workshop, containing prompts and
instructions for upcoming exercises or signposts for what’s happening next. Sending out a
worksheet for participants to collate their key learning or insights on throughout the day
also helps add structure and purpose to the various elements.

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2. Before – set clear expectations for
participants and be sure to enforce them
Share ‘rules’ with all participants at the start. For example:
- Turn off all notifications and distractions (pets and kids allowed!)
- Stay on mute unless speaking
- Use the ‘Participants’ function to ‘raise hand’ (Zoom)
- Use the ‘Reactions’ if you want to show agreement (Zoom)
- When asking someone a question, direct them by name
- If you need a break, just turn off your video
- Use headphones to reduce background noise
- If your computer audio doesn’t work, dial in from a phone
- If you ever lose track, or something isn’t quite working – get in touch on
(add phone number of key contact)

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3. During – maintain an outside in
perspective with customers and experts
There’s no need to forgo working in a customer-led, outside-in way when working
virtually. With plenty of planning it’s still possible to involve both customers and
experts in your workshops.
Conduct one-to-one interviews on Skype or Zoom
For maximum impact we would recommend getting your team face to face with
customers, this helps to humanise the customer and lead to more valuable insight
being unearthed and more empathy being built
Equip the team with a conversation guide – not a questionnaire
Keep any discussion guide very light so that the team feel able to let the
conversation go where the customer wants to lead it. Too many questions and it will
end up feeling like an interview or interrogation
Give plenty of time for people to collect their thoughts
This goes for customers and the team. Use pre-work to get customers reflecting on
their feelings and behaviours ahead of the sessions. And after the conversations
have taken place give the team time to reflect on what they’ve seen and heard. A
simple template to capture their most surprising and important insights
Set experts up to present – but keep it punchy
Take time ahead of the session to work with the speaker on their presentation,
imagine what would be ideal for them to present in a physical workshop, and then
half it. Ensure time for Q&A too so participants get the most out of the inputs

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4. During – facilitate like you’re still a
human in a room of humans
Recognise and accept energy ebb and flow carefully
It takes huge effort to watch someone on screen for more than 30 mins so
workshop pace and flow needs to be carefully thought through. Change the pace
throughout the workshop by creating break out group, using breaks and
incorporating individual reflection ‘downtime’ into the agenda to give participants’
eyes a rest.
Control group sizes with breakout rooms to keep conversations
manageable
Four to five people can have a useful and ‘human’ conversation over video that goes
beyond people being asked their thoughts in turn - provided they have an active
moderator. Any more than that though, will quickly become unwieldy. Use breakout
rooms to do this. Each breakout groups should all have a moderator or facilitator to
keep the conversation or task on track.
Present with clarity and energy
it’s really important to be clear, concise and engaging. If we’re sharing information
or insight, rehearse properly. Any slide content needs to be big, bold and simple –
proper presentation slides not documentation slides as people’s screens are just too
small and the concentration span isn’t there.
Use an ongoing energiser to fill gaps
Have an ice breaker to manage the silences and gaps that happen when waiting for
people to connect. For example, ask everyone to share their favourite or most hated
item related to working from home. Music works well, too.

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5. During – use every tool at your disposal
to invite and collate perspectives
Capturing, building on and developing the themes that emerge as the workshop
unfolds is perhaps the biggest challenge virtually as the usual human cues of
agreement (or lack of) are harder to spot
Capture thinking live and visibly
Verbal playbacks can be overwhelming; use a shared document to capture thinking
in a way that’s live and visible, sharing this to surface key themes throughout the
session. Invite participants to annotate this to, for example, build on or challenge
ideas. This could be as simple as jotting down three simple takeaways from a group
breakout in Powerpoint, then sharing this on screen once the groups return to a
plenary session and encouraging people to annotate the parts they agree with.
Use virtual and standard techniques to gauge consensus
Use the ‘Clapping’ reaction to gauge agreement and energy around certain themes
in a virtual setting where it’s harder to gauge (thanks to the team at Eat Big Fish for
this idea!) Having a flipchart in the field of view, or even a wall of post its, works as a
reassuring visual cue that all opinions and insights are being captured. These can be
shared following the workshop, and endorsements or challenges encouraged in
response
Use 1-2-1 interactions for maximum impact
When talking to customers to understand their needs, video provides a great way to
have immersive 1-2-1 conversations. These are an impactful way of uncovering
insight, and work very powerfully if they can be incorporated into the agenda and
conducted ‘live’ on the day.

8. A tried-and-tested approach – recent example (March 2020)
(including live customer conversations)
5. Sharing customer insights
Returned to four-person breakout
rooms to exchange findings from
individual customer interviews and
identify commonalities / differences
6. Expert immersion
Dividing the group in two, each team
heard short presentations followed by Q&A
with two experts, followed by a facilitated
discussion of highlights and implications
7. Individual reflection
Time for participants to reflect
individually, collating their key learning
into one worksheet
8. Plenary exploring implications
Final facilitated plenary session
exploring big themes and implications
from the day
1. Pre-read
Stimulus was turned into a
digestible pre-read for
participants, and distributed
ahead of the workshop
2. Plenary introduction
Ice-breaker to set the tone as interactive,
followed by brief context setting and ways
of working. Navigation deck shared on
screen to steer us through the day at
various points
3. Breakout groups to explore insight
Split the team into virtual breakout
‘rooms’ of four, each with a moderator,
to explore their takeaways from the
existing insight in the Pre-read
4. Customer video 1-2-1s
1-2-1 depth interviews between each
participant and a customer using
Zoom video calls, with downtime
afterwards to summarise findings