Within the organizations, teams tend to use meetings for sharing information. This may lead into discussions and result in even more meetings for further discussions, making decisions or taking actions. According to a survey reported by Harvard Business Review, more than 83% of managers find the meetings underproductive.
Too many meetings could be quite overwhelming for the participants and reduce their productive work hours. With the spread of digital technologies, it’s now easier and even more common to have distance meetings. Besides the ongoing dispute on the efficiency of digital meetings compared to physical and in person events, the ease of requesting virtual meetings may result in the increase of the total hours spent in meetings by the staff as well.
Why and when to run a workshop?
While matters are usually being “discussed” during the meetings, workshops are events where things happen and some piece of “work” is carried out. Due to their highly structured nature, workshops normally include a very strict agenda, timeline and subject and at the end there will be some type of achievement or deliverables at the end. The team works in an intense but organized process where productivity is highly appreciated. Obviously, it is not possible nor recommended to substitute all your meetings with workshops. These are two powerful tools at your disposal and the trick is knowing which one is more useful at the time.
Why are workshops better than conventional meetings?
Workshops have several advantages over meetings by:
- Creating a strong momentum in the team which can slingshot the progress level
- Generating a strong sense of shared purpose between participants by bringing all hands on the deck
- Fulfilling what can take multiple meetings to accomplish in a shorter time span
- Everyone can collaborate on the solution and feel included which creates a strong bond for participants to follow up with the results afterwards
How to plan for a workshop?
There are some considerations before deciding to run a workshop which will help you to have a pleasant experience and achieve useful results:
- Know your audience
Think thoroughly about who your attendees are or should be, what their experience area and level is, what they already know about the topic, and why you need them there. - Plan the activity hours, breaks and pauses
Especially in longer workshops it is necessary to keep a rational number of activity hours and consider some refreshing breaks in between long sessions. - Define topics and outcomes
It is crucial to focus on a specific topic and have an estimation about what the outcome should look like. The methodology and tools that you pick for facilitating the workshop usually includes this. However, you should be aware of them while planning as well. - Prepare the environment and provide the supplies
If the workshop happens in a physical location, the lighting, workspace, noise level and other environmental conditions are important to keep the team focused and engaged as well as some markers, sticky notes, white boards and so on if required. For virtual workshops, it is important to make sure all the equipment and software are available for everyone and the participants have enough knowledge of using them properly.
Do you need a facilitator?
You may organize and run workshops internally at your organization. In most cases, teams may lack the knowledge or experience of how to run a successful workshop which in this case, hiring a facilitator is crucial. It takes time and a lot of effort to gain the experience of facilitating an effective workshop. Just like when you have a problem with your car and you lack the knowledge so you simply take the car to a repair shop instead of investing time to educate yourself as a mechanic, it is a more viable choice to hire a workshop expert as well.
We highly recommend to hire an external facilitator to achieve more reliable results and have a smooth workshopping experience. An external facilitator is an important factor in running workshops because:
- You need a non-biased person
Any member of your team will not have an untainted viewpoint to the subject. This will eventually divert the workshop result towards an unrealistic conclusion. Instead, an external facilitator will stay objective by following the methods and asking the right and critical questions. - Creating greater engagement rate
Facilitators are trained and experienced at keeping all the participants engaged. It is important to minimize the distractions and keep focused so everyone can be heard and reflect during the workshop. - Increase the positivity and resolve possible conflicts
It is very likely that not all the participants agree on some matters and conflicts may arise during the session. A trained facilitator knows exactly how to turn the disagreements into productive collaboration. This will result in inclusion of different opinions at the final results.
Check our Workshops page to discover more useful tools for developing your team and projects.
