How Do I Make Remote Work Engaging?
tinyurl.com/AAcirclesEngage if you want to see the actual board
This week Gareth Lees-West and I co-facilitated an Agile Circles event on Making Remote Work Engaging. We've collected all the activities we ran so anyone can run these themselves later.
Thanks so much if you came along to the session! Our aim was to learn as a group about how to make remote work engaging, by making our Agile Aus Circles session engaging! We got some feedback that it was, and we certainly felt so.
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GETTING STARTED
The session in Zoom was set up and hosted by Agile Aus circles, and Rachel from Slattery kicked off with a lovely introduction that included a welcome to country. Then we commenced by inviting everyone onto a Mural board (see main pic above).
TIPs:
Gareth created a Tiny URL tinyurl.com/AAcirclesEngage to make i.e. easier to share the link to the board.
We both had screen backgrounds on Zoom with the URL above our heads so that anyone who arrived late could go to the link without asking.
We also put the link into the Zoom chat for those who were present and on the call.
We use a single license Mural account (mine) which has unlimited visitors allowed. This means that for about ~$200 AUD a year I can host and run a multitude of events and workshops. It's paid for itself as I've used it with at least 5 clients in the past two years.
We practiced in Zoom beforehand to ensure we were familiar with the Zoom features available to attendees. Most tools have similar but different features so it’s always good to practice on the real tool.
FOUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES
We revealed four guiding principles for the session:
Drink our own Champagne - Or you might think of this as Eat our own Dog Food, which basically means we were going to try and learn about being engaging by being engaging. No powerpoint slides!
We WILL meet the timebox - We wanted people to know that we had to move fast and didn't have a lot of time for listening to every person read out every post it, this was important because there was a big crowd but we didn't know that in advance, we had to have ways to time our sessions and move on.
Engagement is a team sport - We let everyone know that WE ALL were the team during the session. We were all learning from each other, we didn't have all the answers but we had some time for workshopping and trying to digest some more answers from this collected team of people.
Tools, Techniques and Tips - we were going to cover all of those things, use a lot of them, and talk about some more (and also link to some more via our blog and newsletter).
TESTING ENGAGEMENT & TOOLS
We tested our engagement and tools straight away by asking everyone to indicate they were ok to move onto the next activity using the Zoom features of reactions, and we could see that people were engaged as all the thumbs and claps emoji started to appear.
TIPs:
Having guiding principles or ground rules for the session helps to orient everyone at the start and set expectations, for example the 'be engaging' part of it let everyone know that we were on a mission to engage them!
Testing engagement early by getting people to react or use the chat channel is always a good idea.
Letting people know that content is available later via links let’s them relax and enjoy the session without scribbling down links and titles.
The principles (and in fact all) of the activities started as being hidden on the board. We revealed them one by one which allowed us to control what activities we are doing without spoiling where we are heading. Both Mural and Miro let you do this easily, in other tools you can 'fake' this by hiding content behind coloured blocks that you can remove.
ACTIVITY #1
After the guiding principles it was time to engage in our first activity, which was to share a postie with our names on it, plus a picture of our 'Current Mood'. While I was explaining how to do it I did a short tutorial on how to use the board in case anyone hadn't used Mural or an equivalent before. It's quite intuitive but any new tool takes time to learn. I shared my screen and demo’d how to use it, I revealed the instructions to the activity which were written on the board, but by then people were already going crazy creating posties and their pictures of their moods on the board.
Michael seems curious
I think Brett is hungry
my fave
TIPs:
Share your screen so people can follow along if they are not used to the tool you are using.
Have your example completed i.e. 'here's one I started earlier' so you can show what you are after quickly.
Having instructions clearly written next to each activity area allows people to self serve if they stopped paying attention to what you were saying - it happens!
Allow people to start playing around in the tool as soon as they are comfortable. Playing is learning!
If you have a large crowd or unpredictably sized crowd, have ways for them to engage that don't require everyone slowly sharing or talking, a postie with a name on it does wonders for Identifying people AND helping you to know how everyone is feeling.
Pics and Gifs add a fun element.
Show other features of your tool, e.g. I demo'd how to draw with the pen tool because I knew that a drawing exercise was coming up next.
ACTIVITY #2
Next was a drawing game. This activity is intended to get people quickly working together with a set goal with a focus on fun. Teams are formed to draw an animal or object together within a collaboration tool, with the limitations of time, working on one part each and communicating only via chat or within the collaboration tool itself.
The art speaks for itself!
TIPs:
Using a frame helped people know where to draw.
Using the chat channel to capture Animal suggestions varied the engagement tools - it gets people moving around, at least moving virtually.
When you have a big number of people, pre-determining groups on something like "First name starts with" at least makes that part of getting into groups really fast.
Break out rooms can work really well in virtual sessions however you can loose a lot of time getting people in and out of them AND understanding the rules.
Mural has a voting tool built in, but equally you can provide people with coloured dots for voting OR get them to mark a dot with the drawing tool to vote - just like real life!
ACTIVITY #3
Next we wanted to move off the Mural and interact more in chat. So I had some pre-prepared questions to ask everyone to break the ice and have a little fun. I revealed each question one by one and we answered in the chat. "Using TWO WORDS and two words only... answer the following into the Chat Channel of Zoom"
TIPs:
Using a constraint like 'In two words only' helps to make people think a little creatively but also answer fast.
Icebreaker questions are a very quick way to get everyone to engage at the start of a meeting and using chat means you don't need any fancy tools to do so.
Sometimes the chat tools can take a few seconds to catch up and then you end up with a nice lively stream of fun answers, so give it some time to kick in.
If you don’t think you can come up with good icebreaker questions every time, check out this awesome icebreaker generator! https://icebreaker.range.co/
Someone always answers in more than two words and that's part of the fun😛.
ACTIVITY #4
Then we had a workshop that we ran using the Lean Coffee technique. You can find out more about Lean Coffee here. We explained the rules, brainstormed a list of topics related to 'Wins, Issues or Questions on making remote working engaging' and allowed the team to vote on the topics to set the order. We then had time to discuss the top 4 voted topics. The team provided all the content for discussion which allowed us to focus on facilitating.
TIPs:
We used "Roman Voting" which means "Thumbs Up" keep on the topic "Thumbs Down" move onto the next topic.
Some people who had video on just did thumbs up and down with their physical thumbs which was also useful - it can be hard to monitor the thumbs situation when there's a big group so you might need to ask a few times for people to show their thumbs vote if the count is not obvious in a big crowd of people.
Overall you have to think through how your tool of choice will behave and plan a little in advance and you may have to allow for people not having their cameras on.
We used Zoom reactions but not everyone in Zoom can use or access thumbs down easily so we used open-mouth-emoji for thumbs down when it came to Roman voting.
ACTIVITY #5
We had planned on playing The Flow game next (which I've already blogged here) but Gareth and I could both see that people were enjoying Lean Coffee AND we wouldn't have time for it, so we moved on instead to the final activity.
TIP:
If you are doing a lot in one session like this, and you can't practice with a real sized group first, then have some extra sessions planned in that you can cut if you need to, and agree with your co-presenter about how you can do that.
ACTIVITY #6
Gratitude/Kudos board was our last activity. This activity is a simple quick way to bring a sense of connection through gratitude. This can be used to acknowledge individuals or more broad themes within 5 minutes. Set a timer for a few minutes, ask attendees to pause and reflect on someone or something they are thankful for and add a sticky note to the board accordingly. Depending on the amount of time you have, consider asking people to explain why they chose their notes, or with more time you can walk through each one. As an add on, ask if other people's cards resonate with them & any they would like to shout out.
TIPs:
Gratitude is a great way to finish a session like this or indeed any group session where you are collaborating together.
CLOSING
Closing was facilitated by the wonderful team at Slattery's and a bunch of us stayed around for some incidental chit chat after.
Other ideas we discussed during the session:
Quizzes on Kahoot are lots of fun
Jigsaws on https://jigsawpuzzles.io/ allow you to remotely do jigsaw games together
Playing a game of cards remotely can be done on https://playingcards.io/
Water cooler drop in sessions but run it with a Lean Coffee approach to make it less awkward.
FINAL TIP:
For any session to be engaging its a good idea to ensure you are inviting people to be engaged. We did this by creating activities that people can take part in. Doing something is always more engaging than simply listening or watching, so when you have your next remote session see if you can get your attendees participating in some activities with you!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS…
Alex Stokes is a co-founder of ReBoot Co. and has spent many years in the industry specialising in Agile and Lean approaches. She finds pleasure in coaching, teaching, and helping other companies solve their problems.
Gareth Lees-West is an experienced Coach at ReBoot Co. who brings transformational improvement to teams with a combination of experimentation and learning.