We all filed into the meeting room. I had booked room 5.06 after quite some effort to secure the room in the calendar. Rooms are hard to get, after all!
Just about everyone had shown up. Then someone mentions: “Can we send a Skype or Zoom link to so-and-so?”
I sigh, feeling a bit annoyed. After all, why can’t this person show up to our meeting room? I dig into my memory banks to remember how to set up an online meeting to cater to this individual.
This scenario was a reality before COVID-19 rocked our world. While so much has changed, what have we gained in forging human connections in this new world?
Face-to-face meetings have considerable advantages. It is easy to capture the nuances of human connection. Walking into a workshop, observing who walks in with who. Watching how workshop facilitators engage with their audience.
The surprise of people’s varied micro expressions: small smirks, furtive glances. Seeing who dominates the room with their questions and body language. Face-to-face meetings are wonderful for the curious. What social networks emerge in the room? What people do we pay attention to, where are people’s body language incongruent with what they say, and what is not being said?
Yet face-to-face meetings weren’t all a bed of roses.
I would watch many meetings, wondering why so many people needed to gather in the same place. I felt slight dismay, especially when one or two people dominated meetings. I could feel the energy being sucked out of the room as we listened to lengthy diatribes. The same statement repeated — using different words each time.
What got to me was the inefficiency of many of these meetings or workshops. With no structure, no clear leader or timekeeper — and no one to call out when we moved into irrelevant topics. Some participants would use the audience to “get on their soapbox”. So many of us would be content to sit there and waste valuable hours. I remember the frustration of estimating the hourly rate of everyone in a room. During this tedious meeting, I worked out a ballpark dollar figure — how much money was wasted? Maybe a small handful of people had clear actions from the meeting. Yet is it efficient to have 5% of people actively involved — what about the rest of us 95%?
It is easy to blame workshop facilitators, leaders or whomever you like. Yet even when these factors are effective — how do you engage every single person in the room?
My heart sinks when I see quiet yet accomplished subject matter experts sit as untapped resources in these meetings. They patiently listen to others and formulate their own views. Yet how many workshops finish without truly capturing the benefit of these experts time and considered opinions?
Those leading this meeting may not want input from anyone or seek a “rubber stamp” from attendees. While a cynical view, this is possible.
Yet what if meeting leaders truly want buy-in from participants?
- We gain audience data for solution co-creation;
- Audiences start to “own” the solution to problems posed in a workshop;
- The same audience feels heard;
- We capture their share of attention span well after the workshop. Your audience is keen to track timely progress updates.
In this post-pandemic era, educational technology tools have become the norm. This is in stark contrast to our pre-2020 days, where an online quiz was a geeky add-on or novelty! It was refreshing to attend a team meeting and enjoy a Kahoot! quiz. The novelty of downloading an app on your mobile. Participating in a series of fun quiz questions run by leaders. Scrambling to lock in quiz answers — collaborating, laughing … and remembering the good times.
This article has two aims:
- Expand your thinking about workshops and audience engagement;
- Introduce (via links) many cool educational technology tools for use in workshops.
Expanding our idea of workshops
When you think of workshops, you might consider the planning involved in workshop delivery. Then the actual delivery — and for some, the aftermath of the workshop. Could this aftermath (in your mind) consist only of the room cleanup? Or a concluding discussion with participants who elected to stick around after your workshop? Or a thank-you email to participants?
What if we have nine parts to a workshop instead of only three?
1. Pre-workshop input: Promote your draft workshop agenda, yet provide participants control over topics. Take things a step further and provide “sneak previews” of what to expect or prototypes. Tools like SessionLab or a combination of Google Docs, including Sheets, Slides and Forms — may do the trick.
2. Pre-workshop organisation: Remove obstacles to your workshop “customer experience”. A straightforward registration is necessary. Are many (or all) of your participants from within your organisation? If so, Microsoft Forms captures participant data without any extra effort on your part. Not every participant has the same system ecosystem as you. Will anyone need to install online conference or quiz software for your workshop? What simple and handy instructions can you provide?
3. Pre-workshop transformation work: At what point before your workshop do you “cut off” registrations and lock in your agenda? What content can you tweak based on participants’ pre-workshop feedback?
4. Workshop input solicitation: The fun part — engaging people throughout your workshop. Is there a tactful way to test audience comprehension of particular concepts? Or foster a sense of fun or competition?
5. Organising input: There’s an art to this. How do you sprinkle the right blend of quiz questions, polls, word clouds and comment capture? Beyond keeping people engaged, what information and outcomes are your workshops aiming for? How can each “input” help you achieve this? Can you arrange people’s input within workshops? In my experience, Miro is brilliant for this. Take the “tactile” part of workshops, like arranging post-it notes on a whiteboard, into the electronic age.
6. Transforming workshop input: Can you transform your workshop data into themes? Each participant response is a single data point. Sound transformation links every data point to your workshop’s goal even when participants respond to questions meant to instil a sense of fun.
7. Post-workshop follow-up: Nice work! You left participants with a rosy glow after your brilliant workshop. They felt engaged throughout with your artful questions. Participants left your workshop feeling heard. Now what? Well, your participants might wake up at 3 am with a burning question to ask you. Or, in the shower, an idea stemming from your workshop hits them. How do they relay this idea to you? Do you have a clever platform to cater to these serendipitous questions?
8. Organising pre, post and within-workshop data into outcomes: Why invite participants to your workshop if it doesn’t lead to tangible outcomes? A workshop is two-way; otherwise, you could have run a presentation or created a video. So you have all this participant data. Reframe your thinking of this data. This data is every participant’s contribution to the solution everyone is working towards. Then how do you link every data point to this higher purpose? What contributions frame risks or issues?
9. Post-workshop audience data transformation: This is where you sustain your audience’s respect. “You spoke; we listened.” Can you show the progress your team have made on audience ideas and inputs? Have you crafted Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) using carefully collected audience data? In short, have you made the very best of collaborative technology resources? Have you heard your audience and made tangible progress from their time and energy?
With a systematic workshop approach, you are in a far better position to harness the power of your audience. When your audience walks out of your workshop feeling like they have had fun, felt heard and learned, you have won hearts. After all, people will remember how your workshop made them feel over specific content.
An engaged audience motivated to keep tabs on your solution’s progress … is where you have won their minds.
So how will you apply what you have learned here as part of the art of winning audience hearts and minds?
Our book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out our online course on Change Management.