Lessons from Virtual Facilitation

thoughtful design + an open mind = awesome virtual events

Since the very early days of the pandemic, I have been designing and delivering virtual meetings, workshops and retreats for diverse multicultural teams in Canada and abroad. I’ve learned a lot along the way about what it takes to design and deliver inclusive, engaging, effective and FUN (!) virtual experiences for groups of people who are working together. 

Here are some of the most important takeaways. 

Lesson #1: You must identify and address barriers to participation from the very beginning. 

For every person who navigates online platforms and virtual meetings with ease, there is someone who needs additional support and care to take part in the conversation. Here is what I’ve learned so far. 

Participants with slow or unreliable internet connections will need support to participate in other ways. 

This could look like: 

• providing an option to call in by phone. 

• setting them up in a private meeting room with a strong wifi connection. 

• designing a hybrid approach, where some gather in person, and others participate virtually (although this doesn’t always work - see below!). 

Be proactive about designing your meeting with accessibility needs in mind - and without putting anyone on the spot. 

For example: 

• Make it a regular practice to turn on captions, so that those who are deaf or hard of hearing can follow the discussion more easily. That said, captions are not perfect, so it also helps to encourage and remind all participants to keep their videos on, which enables lipreading. And of course, if you have the budget for an ASL interpreter, all the better! 

• If you’re using a virtual whiteboard, make it a habit to verbally describe participant input, and if possible, read it all out loud. Even if this isn’t possible because there is a lot of input, state some examples out loud. This could help those with visual impairments and neurodivergence to process the information in a way that better works for them.

• Invite feedback in a variety of ways: verbally, in writing, through images or by “doodling” on a virtual whiteboard. Quick online polls and surveys can also be helpful. There are lots of possibilities. Be creative! 

Remember: the participants might never have met in person before, so be realistic about how far a conversation can actually go. 

As we all know, there has been a lot of movement in talent during the pandemic. Therefore, there is a very good chance that at least some meeting participants have never met their teammates in person before and haven’t developed a rapport with them. 

This is the type of barrier to participation that can be very easy to overlook, but it can be a very big one. If the majority of a team used to work together in person prior to the pandemic, anyone who joined after a transition to virtual work might be especially challenged to integrate into the team. As facilitators, it is our job to:

• be alive to this possibility, and seek to understand a team’s history of working together; and

• design the meeting to help newer team members build as much rapport and comfort as possible with the other participants.

More often than not, a facilitator will need tech support and/or a co-facilitator for a virtual meeting. 

I’ve successfully facilitated virtual events on my own for up to about fifteen people. Beyond that, though, things get challenging, especially if the participants are all coming from different organizations and are used to working with different platforms from each other (e.g. Zoom vs. Teams; Sharepoint vs. Google Drive; Google Jamboard vs. Mural or Miro, etc.). 

It is a better experience for everyone if the lead facilitator is able to focus on what is being shared by participants about the topic at hand, and someone else is keeping an eye on the chat box to respond to tech questions and issues. 

Another word on tech… 

I strongly encourage facilitators to offer participants a quick “how to” session (20-30 minutes) in advance of a virtual event to share the most important features of any online tools they will  be using. I think this is especially important for virtual whiteboards, of which there are now many. 

The “how to” session should be an opportunity for participants to play around in a low-pressure environment. Design the session around a light-hearted, silly exercise. Reassure participants that there is no way they will “wreck” things. And make sure tech support is on hand, since the “how to” session is an ideal opportunity to troubleshoot challenges before the actual event. 

Hybrid formats are great for some things. For others, not so much. 

There is a lot of excitement these days about hybrid events, where some people are physically present in the same room and others join the event online. 

For things like seminars, presentations, and panel discussions, hybrid formats can work brilliantly, provided the virtual component is delivered through technology that ensures high-quality audio and video. 

For hybrid virtual events that are intended to be more participatory and synchronous - like workshops, strategic planning retreats, community consultations, etc. - there are a lot of risks and challenges to keep in mind: 

• It might not be readily apparent, but hybrid events (whether synchronous or asynchronous) require the facilitator(s) to design and deliver two events - not one. Furthermore, if the desire is to convene a synchronous discussion in a hybrid format (i.e. supporting participants to engage with each other in real-time, regardless of how they’ve joined the meeting) this can be very complex and expensive to pull off - and, to top it off, the conversation that happens will probably be somewhat jilted. That’s not a satisfying experience for anyone! 

• It can be very challenging to prevent the in-person component from “taking over” the meeting if there isn’t also a critical mass of people participating virtually (or vice versa). This is especially true if the most dominant personalities are in the same physical space, as they will have a natural tendency to focus on those who are in the same room, and will often forget to address online participants. This can be very alienating for people who are joining virtually, and hinder meaningful discussion.

• Finally, there is always a possibility that people who originally planned to attend in person decide at the last minute to join virtually instead, for any number of reasons. This can completely derail the agenda and design of the meeting, especially if participation becomes very “lop-sided” the day of the event. It is very important to secure participants’ commitment to joining the meeting in one format or the other, and to let them know it will be challenging to accommodate a last-minute switch, barring emergency situations. And even then, the facilitators need to be ready with contingency plans!

That’s what I’ve got for now. I’m curious to hear from others out there, facilitators and non-facilitators alike! What have you learned about virtual meetings? What steps do you take to avoid specific pitfalls? What strategies do you use to make them as engaging as possible? Looking forward to hearing from you in the comments :)