10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Workshop

1. Be clear about the outcomes you want to achieve

This might sound obvious but more often than not people don’t have a clear objective when they run workshops. From my experience people want workshops to be a cure-all, a way to do multiple things at once to gain momentum. But if the objective isn’t clear you could spend all day, or several days, doing a lot but not achieving anything.

2. Send the problem you’re trying to solve ahead of time

People’s subconscious is a powerful tool that you can tap into when you’re looking for creative ideas. For example, if you’re looking to improve the onboarding experience of new employees during corona lockdown and you want to come up with ideas - share this challenge ahead of time to all the participants of the workshop. Preferably give people a week to think about this challenge so their subconscious is thinking about it for at least a few days before the workshop. This will improve the quality of ideas.

3. Halve the time you think you need

It seems everyone thinks workshops need to be full days or several days. I find the quicker they are, the easier it is to maintain energy while still getting great outcomes. With great facilitation, effective exercises and a small bunch of people, you only need a few hours to run most types of workshops. 

4. Double the space you think you need

Where you have the workshop is SO important, and it is often a detail that is overlooked. If you have a workshop with 10 people, book a room that fits 20. Push tables to the side and get people on their feet and moving. Studies have shown that standing meetings take a fraction of the time of traditional sitting meetings. This means you can do more with less time and people usually feel more energetic if they can be up and moving.

Bonus tip for online workshops: create an online environment that conducive to creativity - use Zoom or another tool where you can see everyone’s faces, ensure everyone turns their video on and let them know in advance that this will be expected, use a tool like Miro so everyone can contribute, use polls to make it as interactive as possible and play music during creative sessions or breaks. 

5. Set & send an agenda ahead of time

There is nothing more frustrating than preparing a workshop, having all the right people accept and then having those people arrive late, leave early or disappear for a few hours in between. Shortening the time AND sending an agenda will help people manage their time and other commitments more effectively. If your workshop needs to be a full day or several days, I suggest giving people several breaks or splitting the workshop to be 2 half days rather than 1 full day.

6. Break the ice

I admit icebreaking activities can feel a bit awkward at first, but they are so important, especially now we are all distributed and running most workshops via Zoom. Creating informal connections and becoming more familiar with each other is more important than ever. It also helps with workshop outcomes. If people feel more comfortable and have shared a laugh together, they are going to be in the right mindset to be creative and collaborative. Some icebreaker activities that I have seen work - ask everyone to share a fact about themselves most people don’t know about them or split people into pairs and ask them to spend 1 minute drawing each other and then get everyone to show their masterpieces.

Some real life examples of the portrait in pairs exercise.

7. Set ground rules 

When you’re welcoming everyone to the session, reiterate what the purpose of the workshop is and ask the participants to agree that it is OK for you to interrupt them if needed to keep the workshop on track. For example “we don’t have a lot of time today but we have a lot to get through. It is an interesting topic so naturally, everyone will want to talk about it, so it is OK with everyone if I interrupt when required to keep things on track?”. This eliminates any potential awkwardness and tension when, as a facilitator, you need to tell senior executives to wrap up and move on.

8. Document, document, document

You have hours worth of work scribbled on post-it lots on the wall and then you have to evacuate the room in haste because someone has the room booked right after you. I have made the mistake of not doing this so many times. The easiest way to avoid this inconvenience is to document the outcomes as you go, which leads me to my next suggestion….

9. Facilitate in pairs

I find facilitating in workshops in pairs is so much more effective and enjoyable. While one person keeps the agenda and activities going, the other is in the background taking notes and playing timekeeper. That way, once the workshop is done, you don’t have to spend hours collecting and documenting the outcomes. It is also a great way to help upskill less experienced people who want to strengthen their facilitation skills.

10. Add ample time to discuss & agree on next steps

Again, this one seems obvious, but often people only leave 5 minutes to discuss the next steps. While you have all the relevant people in the room, discuss what needs to be done, delegate who is responsible and agree on timelines. Leave at least 20 minutes for this. This will save lots of time and a long email chain or slack conversation trying to agree on these items afterwards.

Please leave a comment if you have any other suggestions, I would love to hear them.