Remote meetings masterclass
The Remote Meetings Masterclass is designed to address the five biggest challenges reported by the individuals and organisations around the world:
- How to Make People Care About Your Online Meeting
- How to Develop a Reputation For Hosting Great Online Meetings
- How To Become a Confident Online Facilitator
- How to Deal With the Problems That Online Meetings Throw At You
- How to Make Hybrid Meetings Less Horrible
After this workshop, you will ROCK at engaging groups of distant participants in rich, multi-layered discussions. You’ll look professional before, during and after the event – and even when things go wrong. Whisper it… your online meetings might even be fun.
Scroll down for detailed course information.
Who this course is for
- Facilitators of online meetings, workshops, and other events
- High-level managers and coaches working with remote colleagues
- Team members who are enthusiastic about improving productivity and day-to-day communication with their remote colleagues
Format
This workshop is facilitated by Lisette Sutherland and Judy Rees – and offered in a variety of formats:
- Online:
- five 100-minute, interactive online sessions
- two 3-hour interactive online sessions
- Hybrid:
- half day in person + two 90-minute, interactive online sessions
- full day in person + one 90-minute interactive online session
How to register
Register for a workshop in one of the following ways:
- Register for any of the public courses listed on the FIND A WORKSHOP page.
- Request a private workshop for your team: Contact Us.
Technical considerations
This is not a “webinar”! You will be engaging in live conversations with real human beings who share your challenges. You are expected to be heard and seen throughout. As with any remote meeting, each participant of the workshop brings part of the meeting space with them. Please help yourself and others by ensuring you:
- Call from a quiet place.
- Have a stable broadband internet connection. Optimum bandwidth, i.e. internet speed on your side will be at least 10 Mbps download / upload. You can measure it using speedtest.net.
- Use a headset.
- Turn your video camera on.
- To optimise your set-up, follow these suggestions on how to have a great video conferencing setup.
Cost
For one person to attend a public workshop, the cost is 450 GBP / 550 EUR per person.
A private workshop for your team (max 10 people) is 1700 GBP / 2000 EUR.
Contact us
Do you have other questions? We would love to answer them. Please contact us.
Detailed workshop information
Module 1 – How to Make People Care About Your Online Meeting
People are showing up to your online meetings, but they don’t participate. Or worse – they are obviously working on other things and distracting others in the process. How do you make people care enough to prepare, show up, and participate? Convince them to come! Bribe them with competence and great meeting design.
You will learn:
- The three key elements of a great meeting invitation, and how it can demonstrate to that a meeting is really necessary
- Practical strategies to convince people that it’s worth preparing, and tactics for setting preparation work that will get done
- What you can do to make sure the technology works reliably for everyone
- How to use participative activities to make your meeting compelling
- How to reimagine the possibilities of remote meetings, and convince others to do the same
Module 2 – How to Develop a Reputation For Hosting Great Online Meetings
You want to be known for your rockin’ online meetings so that people look forward to your sessions. But developing a reputation for hosting great online meetings can be tricky. You’ll need to:
- Actually host great online meetings 🙂
- Make sure your meetings get better and better
- Make sure people want to spread the word about how great the meetings were.
You will learn:
- Specific techniques to escape the familiar “discomfort zone” of online and hybrid meetings
- Ideas to extend the range of things that can be done in online meetings (Hint: it’s much bigger than you think)
- Tactics for persuading people to switch on their video cameras, and switch off distracting technologies
- Practical advice for hosting great online meetings, with tips for different types of meeting
- Strategies to ensure that post-meeting actions actually happen
- Hands-on experience of multiple facilitation approaches that work reliably
- A clear action plan for how to make sure that word gets out about what you can deliver.
Module 3 – How To Become a Confident Online Facilitator
You’re running online meetings, but you know they could be better. Develop your skills as an online meeting facilitator so you can run rockin’ online meetings where everyone participates and everyone has fun.
You will learn:
- How to structure and design your online meetings for engagement
- Ways to sense – and adjust – the energy of an online meeting group
- Advanced facilitation techniques that work compellingly online
- Effective methods for adapting in-the-room games and activities for the online environment
- How to establish whether your meeting was actually good – or not
- Practical tips for creating feedback loops that lead to continuous improvement
- How to strengthen your skills with hands-on practice in a facilitation “dojo”
- Ideas to extend and deepen your online facilitation network so that it feeds you support, information and skills.
Module 4 – How to Deal With the Problems That Online Meetings Throw At You
Many online meetings are awful. From technical problems to agenda chaos. From people who take over the conversation, to the silent lurkers. Online meetings can quickly become a shambles. As a confident online meetings facilitator, how can you deal with all the problems that online meetings throw at you – and emerge looking productive and professional, time after time?
You will learn how to:
- Prepare yourself and your participants to avoid technical challenges
- Adapt your plan in the moment when the unexpected happens
- Manage overwhelm – your own and your participants’
- Help your group to recognise unhelpful behaviours and to establish clear shared norms and boundaries
- Stop someone who talks to much, while encouraging the silent ones to participate
- Re-engage participants who seem to have checked out
- Recognise when a meeting should be stopped, and the best ways to do that.
If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs and blaming it on you… you’ll be a meeting master!
Module 5 – How to Make Hybrid Meetings Less Horrible
Let’s admit it: Hybrid meetings are bastards! From bad tech, to not being able to see or hear the remote participants clearly, hybrid meetings (where some are in the room and some are remote) are the worst kinds of meetings. But they don’t have to be! With the right equipment and facilitation techniques, you can turn a bad meeting around.
You will learn:
- How to design a hybrid meeting for maximum engagement
- Effective technology tweaks that can help remote people feel part of the group
- The three common mistakes you’ll want to avoid for productive hybrid meetings
- Facilitation techniques to engage both in-the-room and remote participants
- How to get yourself heard when you’re the remote participant
- When a hybrid meeting is probably the wrong option, and you should choose all-in-the-room or all-remote instead.
Your trainers
Author, speaker, consultant, trainer and coach based in London, UK. Leading on distributed diversity and communication clarity in complex contexts.
I’m a facilitator, coach and trainer – mostly working over the internet. Not long ago I facilitated what was probably the world’s first “video unconference” in which 150 people self-organised to talk about the things that mattered to them.
I’m the co-author of a bestselling book, “Clean Language”, which describes a precision inquiry toolkit which works especially well in complex systems. I coach using this methodology, and I also teach Clean Language to Agile coaches and others, mostly online. I’m the co-founder of the Rees McCann Partnership.
I am a remote-working German-born American living in the Netherlands and I am totally jazzed by the fact that it’s possible to work from anywhere. In fact, it’s not just possible; it’s completely, productively workable—if you do it right.
From extensive research and first-hand experience, as well as from interviews with over 100 workers and manager/owners, I have collected a treasure trove of advice & action lists, pitfalls & solutions, and personal reports of individuals and teams engaged in doing great things—successfully—from wherever they happen to be.
What people are saying about the workshop
“I attended the online facilitation workshop recently and had a really fantastic time. Both Judy and Lisette were excellent hosts and had tons of great content, tips and tricks for holding great online meetings. So happy I took the course and can’t wait to start experimenting with the things I’ve learnt.” – Rob Hemsley, Scrum Master
“We’ve already seen improvements in our weekly meetings, and have been able to both reduce meeting time and increase the amount of relevant material discussed! We’re also having good progress with reworking how our dev team gets user feedback, by incorporating the use of breakout rooms and liberating structures.” – Jake Sedlacek, Project Analysit at Shield GEO