Challenges for remote workshops

Remote workshops are a great solution to gather all necessary people in one digital room regardless of geographical limits. However, there are also some potential pitfalls:

• Poor choice of a digital tool and insufficient preparation: Avoid using tools unfamiliar to your team that might take more time to master. Instead, select the tools everyone on your team uses daily for communication or creating artifacts (for example, Notion for taking notes and Google Meet for communication and screen sharing). Take notes and don't solely rely on session recordings and transcripts, especially if there are a large number of participants.
• Bad planning for workshop activities: Cutting back on warmups, icebreakers, or team-building activities because you're short on time won't result in a productive session. Icebreakers help people relax and feel more confident to share honest thoughts. Team-building activities are vital if you involve people from different departments who aren't familiar with each other. If schedules clash, move workshop activities to asynchronous mode using email or corporate messaging platforms like Slack to gather feedback.
• Failure to define workshop goals and instructions: It's much harder for facilitators to have everyone's full attention and prevent participants from getting distracted during remote workshops. What might help is to clearly state the goals at the beginning of the session and define the expectations. Also, send clear instructions and the workshop agenda before the session, so participants have enough time to familiarize themselves and prepare for the meeting.^[1]