After the big move to online workshop delivery in 2020, at Melbourne Leadership Group we've recently had the experience of once again running face to face workshops. Being back in front of clients in real life has an invigorating buzz to it, and we love supporting the energy and sense of common purpose in a group of people, as they draw on their creative instincts and collaboration emerges.
However face to face collaboration in a COVID-safe environment is necessarily different to what we've all experienced before. As leaders and facilitators guiding groups of people through team meetings, town halls, workshops and conferences, it's worth being aware of some of the differences we've noticed compared to what we were used to.
1. Safety first
One of the important design elements in face to face workshops in 2021 is setting up the room to be COVID safe. That means having chairs a metre apart where possible, minimising the re-use of whiteboard markers and other high touch tools, regularly sanitising high-touch surfaces, tools and devices, and providing hand sanitizer stations around the workshop space. The safety-first mantra even extends to how catering is ordered, with the provision of morning teas and lunches in boxed individual serves now more prevalent.
2. Hybrid participation
Notwithstanding our strong preference that we have either all participants online or all participants attending a workshop in person, it's become much more common for face to face workshops to have some online participants. This hybrid delivery mode requires careful attention to ensure that all participants feel equally included. Critical elements, like having seamless technology and impeccable audio, are required for the experience to feel smooth and productive for all participants.
3. More compact design
We've noticed a trend with our clients towards shorter, sharper workshop sessions. Mindful of the task efficiencies and time savings we collectively developed during 2020 by using new technologies and cutting travel time, we've noticed clients preferring a later start and an earlier finish to workshops. We always recommend shorter workshops for online delivery, but even face to face sessions are becoming much more focused and compact in nature. This challenges leaders of facilitated sessions to make the most of very valuable time and design carefully.
4. Need for interactivity
It's currently less common in a COVID-safe in work environments for entire teams to come together at once. Where they do, for the purposes of strategic planning or training, it's critical to make the most of that collaborative time. We've been giving greater thought to our workshop and conference design, to ensure that tasks which can be completed individually are set as pre-work to be completed in advance of workshops. This ensures that the time groups spent together is on focused collaborative and interactive work with each other.
5. Digital capture
Whilst we love the organic and emergent qualities of people brainstorming ideas onto a real life whiteboard, we are increasingly turning our minds to digital forms of content capture to ensure successful sharing with online participants and integration into immediately workable documents that can be easily circulated to colleagues working remotely. The challenge of capturing hand-generated models, ideas and concepts in clever digital ways is one we are embracing in order to share and evolve workshop content quickly.
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