This article is for remote workshop facilitators and participants. Thank you to Moni Gmitro and Oliver Luo for your insightful comments and my VMware Tanzu Labs colleagues for sharing what you know.
Facilitation underpins the way VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly Pivotal Labs) balanced teams work together. Collaboration leads to better results for software teams, and the ability to work in distributed teams has also become a core skill for many of our clients. While some distributed teams got started by adapting facilitation practices from the physical world, a new generation of colleagues has never experienced the joy of collaborating with paper sticky notes and hybrid teams are becoming more prevalent (where there is a mix of remote and in-person collaboration).
It is crucial for every team member to invest in remote facilitation skills so that you can have productive working sessions. These skills are just as important as the skills specific to your role or discipline and should be grown with intention. As with any other process or skill that a team iterates on, you should evaluate and iterate on remote facilitation practices.
Make it easy
Building software is hard even under the best circumstances. Facilitated workshops and collaboration sessions can help a team reveal assumptions and de-risk your product so you can move fast through the build, measure, and learn cycles. Facilitation is a common thread in how balanced teams make progress and accomplish the work of lean product management, user-centered design, and extreme programming. Skilled remote facilitation can help the team make better decisions faster to make progress towards a shared goal.
Remote facilitators need to make it easy to drive participation. Expectations for the contributions of participants and facilitators are higher in a collaboration session than a meeting, pairing session, or work session in a conference room with stickies and Sharpies. For example, participants may need to use a new tool and process to make their contributions. Facilitators are challenged, as a colleague put it, “to invent a meeting type that gets us past the huddle.” By iterating on our remote facilitation practices, we promote collaboration that is key to great software teams and leads to better results for the outcomes we are driving towards.
Facilitator (host) and participant user journey for a remote collaboration session. (Source)
Make good use of your team’s time
The nature of remote work often necessitates using calendar invites to create space for collaboration; but it is important for the invite’s intent to be clear: These are team work sessions, not meetings. Remote teams need productive work sessions meant to share knowledge and make progress. By investing in our facilitation skills, we are respectful of our team’s finite time and draw out the knowledge that is in the room.
Prepare (to be flexible)
Planning a workshop takes time and effort. Preparation for remote collaboration may be more hands-on compared to in person, where your stickies and Sharpies call on different skills. Get comfortable with your tools and get clear on the focus of the meeting so you can pivot when your learnings in the session take the team in a different direction.
- Identify the priority for the team – Set clear intentions for the time and make your board support that focus. Lock background objects to help the team focus its energy on what’s most important.
- Get inspired and leap forward with templates – It’s easy to use digital whiteboard templates. Learn from others and try something new—then contribute your own template to the community!
- Be ready to adapt and pivot – It can be tempting to stick with a plan for a workshop, especially if you have a digital whiteboard laid out. You’ll likely have to adjust a template to make it work for your team, before and during your activity. Get comfortable with your tools so you can walk away from your plans as you learn together—that’s why you’re working as a team!
- Practice with the team when stakes are low – Sometimes preparation is just getting the team familiar with the techniques, expectations, and outcomes in a practice session so that they are ready to fully engage in higher stakes collaboration. See How to Conduct a Remote Event Storming Session for an example.
If one person is remote, the whole team is remote
Have you been to a remote meeting where part of the team is in-person sharing one laptop (camera and mic), and the rest of the team is on the Brady Bunch grid of Zoom or Teams? It can be challenging to distinguish voices and participate. Add notes on a physical whiteboard to the mix and it is difficult for the full team to engage. To make the session more equitable and to leverage the team, many of my VMware Tanzu Labs colleagues and I treat hybrid teams as remote teams:
- Colocate, but join the Zoom meeting individually – Join with your laptop camera to help remote attendees capture social cues and identify who is speaking. Join using the conference room’s audio so it is clear.
- Be intentional about inviting people to speak – Commit to iterating on how you moderate contributions from the whole team, including chat.
- Run the session on your digital whiteboard – Documentation is inherent, and it creates the opportunity to leverage the features of your whiteboard and Zoom, like zooming in to read text. Ensure that everyone has access to a workspace and that they can use it easily. Ask your participants in advance if the tools you are using will work for them; digital whiteboards and even alternative note-taking apps like Google Docs are often inaccessible to participants using screen readers.
Give direction
Facilitators can make it easier for their teams by setting expectations, including getting the team aligned on what participation means for the activity. In a remote setting, this might look like, “I don’t expect your camera to be on, but I do expect you to participate and be present.”
- Orient participants through each step of the session – Make sure the team knows when you’re done with a section and moving onto the next one, and what you expect them to do. In addition to being clear about the intended outcome of each section, you may need to walk your team through the steps in the specific tool you are using to accomplish the task. For example, “We will use the voting feature for this step. I will share my screen to show you how to do that before we begin.”
- Keeping things moving – Ask the current speaker to choose the participant who will speak next. This popcorn style cuts down on the overhead of remote meetings where social cues may be reduced and keeps participants engaged. Using “raised hands” in your video call can help the team identify who hasn’t spoken yet.
Start with an icebreaker
In remote collaboration, icebreakers are a community activity where the team can learn about each other, especially when there are less spontaneous opportunities to get to know your colleagues. Ice breakers are also an opportunity to make sure everyone is comfortable with the tools (especially in the ways the team will have to use them in the session). They can also get people engaged before you begin potentially challenging work.
The following are some ideas (Shout out to my colleagues for breaking out new ideas!):
- Two-word check-in – Check the energy the team is bringing with them to the session. We don’t need details, but we do need to understand what people are bringing to the session and bring compassion.
- Search for a template in your whiteboard tool (Miroverse icebreakers)
- Pick a (insert: animal on an animal scale, place to go on vacation, etc.) and explain why
Mood check-in icebreaker. (Source: Goals Prioritization Miroverse/Figma Community)
Take breaks
If you’re scheduling a long work session (i.e., more than an hour – keep sessions to under 2 hours), build in a break. Pausing the session for breaks when the team is remote is kind and allows the team space to take care of their needs so that they can fully show up.
- Tell people what to expect – Google the length of your break (e.g., “15-minute timer”) and share your screen to provide the countdown timer. You can also use the timer on your whiteboard tool.
- Embed a quick game time – Here are some remote game options with context.
- Shorten your calendar invites – Even if the team doesn’t have an activity planned, shortening the invite by 5 or 10 minutes allows your team to have a break for their next activity. This builds in an option for a quick walk or screen break between their next thing.
Make remote and hybrid better
Tanzu Labs has excellent remote facilitation resources that can spark ideas for innovating practices on your team. Sometimes a practice may not fit a particular team but will become relevant as a team evolves or can provide value to you on a future team. Software teams are learning organizations. Tools like Miro and Zoom create unique opportunities to be intentional about innovating remote collaboration with our teams and products. As companies consider investing in in-person work and travel, we must also invest in making remote and hybrid better.
Keep iterating
- Invest in psychological safety – This is important for every team, but especially remote teams where social cues and impromptu hallway chats require more intention. Investing in psychological safety underlies a team’s ability to keep trying new things to make hard work easier. See this example of how a retro changed over time to improve team health.
- Get comfortable with your tools – Try new features and grow your practice—Just as engineers learn about an integrated development environment (IDE) and designers continue to upskill in Figma. Share what you know.
- In Miro, try the voting feature vs. using emojis. Experiment with private mode to obfuscate notes by team members. Try hiding/showing the cursors of participants on the board to minimize distractions or see if the group is exploring other areas on the board.
- In Zoom, show participants how to annotate and leverage reactions for participation.
- Bring a beginner’s mindset – Tell your team you’re going to try a new technique or tool and bring them along for an experiment. This requires psychological safety, but also builds it in a low stakes way. Collaborate with humility.
- Ask for feedback – Take a few minutes for feedback at the end of the session. By asking for feedback, we are putting into action our commitment to become a better software team. This shows your team you’re in it together and is an opportunity to create quick feedback loops. The following are some questions to ask:
- How are we doing in our goals to become a better software team?
- Was this a good use of people’s time? Try a return on time invested (ROTI).
- How can we do better? The plus/delta exercise is a simple, quick way to ask for feedback. If you’re rushed, you can come back to it (because documentation is inherent in digital whiteboards).
Lean into remote-first fun
Remote facilitation creates opportunities to try new things and get creative. Just as we include delight in our lean product slice, facilitators should incorporate fun into work sessions.
- Have fun with content and emojis! – Take a minute to learn how to use stickers and images in the tool you’re using. Watch out for cultural references that may be unfamiliar to your team.
- Curate templates based on your team’s interests – Experiment with new activities and create options that draw on the team’s interests (see Pokémon Team Retro).
- Play music during breaks or self-generation time – Be sensitive to people’s needs and check with the group, especially when people are asked to silently write down ideas to share later. Miro’s timer has an option to select music and individuals are able to mute it for themselves. If you share your computer’s sound with Zoom (e.g., to play a team Spotify playlist), participants can’t mute the sound without muting voices.
Meet people where they are
Autonomous teams have the responsibility to make good use of people’s time and support each other in reaching shared goals. To start, we can meet people where they are, which is different for every team, who is in the work session, and the myriad of circumstances that contribute to how individuals show up each day. Facilitators can learn to be aware of and address potential barriers to participation that can impact collaboration.
- Assume people will participate the best they can – Cultivate a generous mindset. Put intention towards noticing quiet assumptions you may be making and confront underlying bias. Do you need cameras on for all calls as a team norm? Does your team feel empowered to make a choice that fits individuals and the team? If you find yourself feeling frustrated, examine if you may be bringing an unconscious bias to your interpretation of how a participant is contributing to a session. How can you create an environment where the team can do their best work?
- Learn the limits of your tools – Consider the accessibility of your tools and the needs of your participants to make your remote activity inclusive. Digital whiteboard tools vary in how usable they are to people with different needs, and might be downright unusable if you have participants who navigate using a screen reader. For video calls where participants use virtual or blurred backgrounds, relying on hand signals captured on video to point stories or vote may be difficult or impossible for some participants to interpret.
Go for it
Agile software teams are familiar with the commitment to continuous improvement, including how we work together. Set an intention to iterate on your remote facilitation skills and put action to it:
- Plan a remote session to align on your team’s goals together. Tanzu Labs has a workshop template to help your team to discuss and align on goals, and make decisions for next steps so that the team can continue to make progress.The templates are available on Figma Community and Miroverse.
- Try new facilitation tools and techniques and invite your team to learn with you.
- Together, decide what actions you will take to make remote and hybrid better for your team.
Recommended resources
- Webinar: Human-Centered Remote Facilitation
- Articles:
- Book: Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama by Janice Fraser and Jason Fraser
About the Author
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