Virtual Facilitation

Why Mute is Killing the Virtual Meeting and How to Change It!

You’re logging into your twelfth online meeting of the week. You promptly turn off your video and mute yourself to silence your family members and pets walking behind you.

The meeting begins, most people aren’t even on video and everyone is muted. Suddenly, you hear Sally slurping her morning yogurt. You chat a message to Sally — “please mute yourself.” Then you roll your eyes and go back to the email you were trying to write while the meeting moves on.

Later, someone poses a question and asks for your response. There’s a few seconds of dead air until you realize you’re still on mute—always a risk when you’re caught off guard while multitasking. Just as you toggle your mic on, someone says, “We can’t hear you, you’re on mute.” You roll your eyes again, grateful your video’s off.

Does this sound familiar? Sadly, this is how the majority of people in the business world are interacting with one another. It’s no wonder that mute is killing the virtual meeting. Let’s see how we can change it!

The Dreaded Virtual Meeting

In a 2021 survey of 40 managers, they were asked about the biggest challenges they face in their current work. The recurring themes:

Navigating change
Navigating communication breakdowns that negatively impact team health
Creating transparency within a remote team
Fostering creative virtual environments for online work
Helping teams get the best out of their work-from-home experience
Building trust and relationships remotely

All of these challenges start and end with how we hold online meetings. So how do we fix the problems and get more out of the virtual workplace?

There are two factors creating the conditions for all the ways a meeting can fall flat: the mute button and turning off your video. These two actions combined can suck the relationship and connection right out of a meeting.

Where’s The Connection in Online Connection?

Believe it or not, virtual meetings themselves are no worse than in-person meetings.

In 2017, Leslie Perlow noted in Harvard Business Review found that 71% of the managers surveyed found meetings unproductive and inefficient; 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.

Meeting virtually on a much broader scale has not changed much. Multi-tasking and feeling stuck in conflict are common complaints, whether you’re meeting online or in person. The pandemic has shone a spotlight on these kinds of meeting dysfunctions because we’re collectively talking about it more.

Although online collaboration tools have seen a surge in use these past two years, they don’t necessarily make online work easier—they just make it possible. And there is definitely an overhead cost. In my experience, it takes upward of 30% more time to plan, design, and get everyone set up for success in an online meeting than if we were just walking into the same physical room and sitting down.

In the office, we take for granted that you can invite people to a meeting, give them the location, and expect that they will get themselves there.

Online, you have to give everyone access and past firewalls, help them navigate the technology, and familiarize them with the features—just to get them into your virtual room.

Virtual Meeting Fatigue

Moreover, going from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting is just as fatiguing as going from meeting to meeting in a physical office space—and we don’t even get the exercise of walking between rooms! And then there is the spouse or child or pet who needs something from you in the middle of your five-minute break. In effect, virtual meetings suffer from the same inherent issues as in-person meetings, but cumulatively lead to an even higher degree of brain fry.

In this context, it’s easy to understand why we’re tempted to turn off our mic and video—but this single act is dooming our meetings from the start.

Because the one thing we are missing most in virtual space is connection.

Having No Skin in the ‘Virtual Meeting’ Game

Mute and video off are the equivalent of coming into an auditorium and sitting in the very back row with a piece of cardboard in front of your face. You have a full view of what’s happening, but no skin in the game. You are an observer, not a participant, and you are signaling to the group that you are not interested in being an active contributor.

When we have one foot in and one foot out, we separate ourselves from what’s really happening. It becomes much easier to criticize the conversation rather than to contribute to it.

Virtual work isn’t the same as face to face, but it does not have to be miserable. You can create a space where people feel connected, heard, and valued—and where their input is genuinely appreciated. Then they’ll look forward to meetings!

When there is real connection, the virtual space can be even better than being in the room for some types of output. In principle, online meetings can lead to better results, more diversity of opinion, and more innovative ideas. Detailed work, large amounts of information, and decision making all lend themselves to online spaces—provided you are using an online collaboration tool that gives everyone equal visibility to the information.

So, how do we get there?

Mute Off and Video On: Tips for Building Trust and Engagement

Affective trust is the strongest and longest-lasting form of trust. It is built gradually as people get to know one another, and it’s crucial for effective and engaged teamwork—whether you’re meeting in person or online. It also takes active facilitation—someone who will help architect the right environment and help the team set new social norms that they agree to collectively uphold.

To have the greatest impact on making your virtual meetings more engaging, fun, and productive, start with these two norms:

Mute Button – “For Emergency Use Only”

There is no greater way to catalyze better team connection than by asking people to be in a quiet place so they can be OFF Mute.

Why? Because hearing people laugh at a joke, sigh, or quickly ask a follow-up question creates connection. It provides instant feedback to the speaker so they feel acknowledged and heard. A collective, shared soundscape is often missing in virtual meetings—and it’s the cornerstone of building affective trust and better teamwork.

Tips to make it work:

Normalize the noises

The dog barking in the background or the car passing by are part of daily life. Normalize these noises! Make it okay that they happen, as long as they are not continuous or overly disruptive. Use mute only if they do become distracting—and then rejoin the conversation when you can.

Embrace collisions

When everyone is off mute, you will sometimes “collide” with one another—when two or more people speak at the same time. When collisions happen, just give it a moment for the speakers to sort out who will go first. Collisions not only empower the group to be responsible to each other, they increase the overall energy in the virtual room.

Video On – All In, or All Out

In a study by Forbes and Zoom, at least 81% of executives said they found that virtual meeting aka video conferencing could strengthen relationships, increase understanding, improve the quality of communication, improve team effectiveness, boost engagement, and promote deeper empathy and cooperation.

When it comes to building engagement and trust, it’s critical to be able to see one another. It’s the only way we can read the virtual room. When you pose a question and just get silence, video provides behavioral indicators about what’s happening for people. One team member might be addressing a child who needs something, another might be looking up or down in a thoughtful way. With video on, the team will have a better sense of how much space to leave one another for thinking, and no one will be sitting there wondering if they’re all alone.

Tips to make it work:

Be fully in or fully out

We waste a lot of time by only showing up partially. When there is an imbalance in participation, it impacts everyone and lowers the quality of the group’s experience and conversation. Just like with in-person meetings, video on means you can see when team members are not responding. To avoid this, create a group norm to either be fully in or fully out. If you make a conscious decision to be fully out, get the summary notes after the meeting.

Just say ‘no’ to multitasking

Oftentimes, video off is used by team members who are trying to multitask during virtual meeting time—they just don’t want to be obvious about it. But the truth is, we can’t multitask, no matter what we may think. What we can do is “task switch.” And when we do, our tasks end up taking 40% longer to complete—and we’ve disconnected from the group conversation. If you need to write that email, you should skip the meeting and write the email.

To reap the benefits of a “video off” meeting culture, create a group norm that prioritizes presence and design meetings that encourage active engagement.

Preparing to Lead Behavior Change During a Virtual Meeting

Introducing new norms to your team can be challenging. Be prepared for people to push back, and take time to listen to everyone’s concerns. People have been trained that it’s rude to be off mute, and they don’t want to eat their lunch on video in front of everyone.

After you have really listened to the concerns, ask people if they would be willing to try it for one week knowing that it has the potential to make a positive and productive impact on the team. After the week, you can revisit the new norms and see how people feel.

This isn’t about making people do something they don’t want to do. It’s about making requests of people to try something new. It might be uncomfortable for people at first, but the result is better outcomes for the collective—better conversations, more voices being heard, higher productivity, and more positive engagement. Almost no teams will want to go back to the way they were working.

When meeting virtually, we can’t always avoid an unstable internet connection, but building team connection can be as easy as keeping your sound and your video on.

How to Lead Engaging and Productive Meetings (Part 2)

..with purpose, clarity and confidence so that Agile will work for you and your team.

In part 1 of this series, I gave you scenarios on what successful facilitation looks like, and what common mistakes people make when first facilitating.

Agile ceremonies seem simple enough, but leading them w/o any training in facilitation can get you into deep water with a team.

The team will start to distrust you or more likely, the agile processes. Which ultimately leads to resistance of ‘agile’.

Therefore, I’d like to take you through a 3 step process to lead engaging and productive meetings.

How to Lead with Purpose, Clarity and Confidence

1 The Mindset and Practice of Being Neutral

Maintaining neutrality is 1 of 5 cornerstones of our agile facilitation stance that we cover in our programs.

2. The Key Steps of Planning and Designing

Collaborative meetings start before you ever get in the room – in person or remote! Learn the invaluable first two steps of our five step Facilitation process, so you can be more intentional and deliberate about your meeting design.

3. Decide How to Decide

It’s just what it sounds like. In the room, be transparent about the decision process.

Don’t Participate, Facilitate!

Let’s start with one of the most common mistakes I see facilitators make. Participating rather than facilitating!

Facilitation is both an art and a science. Yes, you need a process to help guide you in planning and design. And tools in your back pocket to help you navigate different stages of collaboration.

But most importantly you need first to work on your own mindset and beliefs about leadership and leading others.

In our complete Facilitation course, we start with the mindset and beliefs about leading and facilitating, because if you can identify where your mindset might be getting in your way of your work with groups, then that’s the first thing to work on.

We call this the Facilitation Stance – the mindset and beliefs of agile team facilitators.

Interested in Reading and Learning More About Facilitation?

In “The Art & Science of Facilitation”, I dive deep into all 5 cornerstones of facilitation.

The cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance include:

Click the links of each cornerstone to learn more and visit the book’s website!

1 The Cornerstone of Maintain Neutrality

The most common mistake I see is that people read these cornerstones and intellectually think – “I get this”! The challenge is that the nuances of implementing this are much more difficult. Some of these cornerstones are so nuanced in the moment, that they don’t feel like that big of a deal, when in reality these small choices you are making in the moment can be derailing your whole collaboration experience.

How To Practice Neutrality

Focus on the process not the content
- Facilitate don’t Participate!

As the facilitator you own the process – the agenda, the room setup or virtual space configuration, how you’re going to get the group from point A to point B. That’s plenty to be focused on! Stay out of the content. Let the team own the work and what’s getting generated. No one wants to be invited to a meeting and asked for their opinion only to be told they got it all wrong or it’s not what you wanted.

Define the role of facilitation up front with the team.

Not everyone knows what it means to facilitate. AND how the job of the facilitator is to help the group achieve the desired outcomes. Not contribute to creating the outcomes.

Explain the value of being neutral and holding process authority while the team will hold content authority
Ask permission from the team to facilitate – I’m going to try something different today. As long as we reach our desired outcome, are you willing to try this? By asking for permission, the power of facilitation is granted to you from the team.

Facilitators Need To Stay Out of Content

As a general guideline you need to stay out of content! I always say, if this is something that you know about and you believe you have a perspective that might help the group right now, and continuing to remain silent feels inauthentic, then you may step aside from your facilitation role for a moment and contribute content or offer your perspective.

Find a way to do so that is clear to both you and your team. You might say “I’m going to step out of facilitation for a minute” say what you need to say, then get back into the role. Do not ‘hang out there’ for the rest of the meeting.

Here’s why clarity on the role is so important. Trust is needed within the team and between the facilitator and the team. They need to trust that when you say you’re going to help THEM get those objectives accomplished that you mean it. Not that you’ll help them until you believe you have a better way at which point you will shut them down, offer your own opinion, and then ask them if they agree with you.

2 Get Input During Planning

Your stance is one component of skillful facilitation. But what do you do when you find yourself facing resistance to even coming to a meeting or participating?

There can be lots of reasons why people resist meetings, but here is one of the first places I look when people tell me that they are getting resistance to attending an agile meeting – Stand-up, Retrospective or any of the planning meetings.

Don’t make These Mistakes During Planning

Not having a clearly designed purpose and agenda before the meeting starts.
Cutting short the planning and design phase or not planning at all before the meeting.

These mistakes result in meetings that people don’t know why they are there, or how they are supposed to contribute. The conversation goes in circles, one or two people dominate the conversation. The meeting ends without a clear decision or action item and overall participants feel like it was a waste of time.

We are all stingy with our time. Many of us spend more than half our time in meetings each week.

Look at this data:

We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries:

65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work.
71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.
62%said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.

~ HBR August 2017 ‘Stop the Meeting Madness’

That’s incredible! Meetings are expensive and worth it – if done well. But look at the impact if they are not done well.

What Participants Want From Meetings

They want meetings to be…

Relevant
Valuable
Purpose driven
Outcome oriented
Timeboxed
Clear on roles
Engaging
Collaborative

How do you solve this problem then? You start working on all those characteristics before you get in the room.

If you wait until you’re in the room to start, you’re too late!

If your team finds Retrospectives a waste of time and does not want to participate, then find out why. There is likely a really good reason. Engage them in the planning and design for the meeting and Listen to what they have to say.

At TeamCatapult, we use a five phase model for Facilitation called The Facilitation Process.

Two of the most important, yet often skipped or minimized steps in this process is Planning and Design. Planning and Designing happen before the meeting starts, Conduct is what happens in the room. Then Document and Evaluate and Adapt take place after the meeting.

Within Planning there are several very important scope and boundary activities going on but the one I want to highlight today is Identify the Participants and Involve the Participants!

Just like you would not build a custom home for someone without talking to them first. Don’t design a custom meeting without knowing first what people hope to get out of the meeting.

3 Deciding How To Decide

Do you remember the movie with Bill Murray called Ground Hog Day, where he kept waking up each day and having the same day all over again?

If you make decisions in your meetings only to revisit them the next you get together, that’s a clear sign that your decision making process is missing it’s “stickiness” and your decisions are not durable, meaning they don’t last much beyond the meeting

Another sign is lack of energy or follow-through on implementing the decision.

This will be that action item or decision that was made and somehow the progress on it just drags out and you might be perplexed about why it’s taking so long.

A third sign of lack of durability is watching how engaged or not participants are in the decision making process itself. When people use language like ‘It’s fine’ or “yes, let’s just move on’ or ‘just tell me what you want me to do’. These are signs that something might be missing.

Decide BEFORE the Meeting!

Meeting with your meeting sponsor during planning and talk with this person about these three questions:

What is in the team’s scope of authority?
How complex is this decision?
What are you seeking? Consensu, Agreement or Majority Rules?

The greater the complexity the greater the need for consensus. In the room with the team – be transparent about the decision process.

How Will You Grow Your Facilitation and Team Coaching Skills?

Will you keep ‘winging it’ or make a deeper commitment to yourself? What do you want to be known for? How will you make a lasting difference in your team? One that outlasts your time with them? One that lives on with them regardless if you are there or not? Which way will you choose?

You can spend a bunch of time attending free meetups, webinars and watching others as part of self -study. You might find a mentor who can give you some feedback.

All of which can be good strategies. But done alone don’t always provide you the solid foundation for really mastering the craft of facilitation.

Join us for a workshop or our 9 month cohort program.

We need leaders, scrum masters, agile coaches who know how to skillfully connect others and lead collaboration!

If you’re charged with leading change in your organization – at any level – I want to leave you with this thought. Patrick Lencioni, in his book The Advantage said “There is no greater way to have a fundamental impact on an organization than by changing the way it does meetings.”

I believe that we can change cultures by starting to change the way people meet. You don’t have to change your team, or your boss, or your HR department. You just need to shift your mindset and change the way you lead your meetings.

Be the one who leads meetings that people will cancel other meetings in order to attend yours.

That’s how we start to change cultures.

How Do You Facilitate for Unexpected and Unplanned Magic?

How is your remote work going?

Are you missing those things you can’t plan for? Are you not having those “spontaneous, fun, informal collisions where a few people pitch and laugh about a crazy idea and then walk up to a whiteboard when they realize they have something really cool?”

Are You, Too, Longing for the Magic of Human Interaction?

The question that came to me recently is “How do you facilitate for unexpected and unplanned magic?”

Virtual work can be better suited for those planning types of collaboration – setting the goal, tracking the progress, talking about risks, prioritizing the work.

Online tools (like Mural, Miro, etc) make that kind of planning work even more productive online than in person when you have to huddle around a white board.

What happens though, is that you can become so efficient and focused on the task that you end up factoring out the human connections and the random creativity.

It’s Not About Productivity, It’s About Connections

What we miss online is the personal connections and the ‘water cooler conversations’.

We can also miss the *sighs* and *laughs* during meetings, especially if everyone is being polite and taking turns speaking, muting while others are talking, and turning off video.

Trust building is different in remote work than in face to face.

There are three types of trust:

Swift Trust is built quickly when people first meet, but it is the more fragile type
Cognitive Trust is built as people demonstrate they are reliable and competent and is stronger than swift trust
Affective Trust is built gradually and replaces cognitive trust as people get to know one another. It’s the strongest and longest-lasting form of trust.

In face to face work,

swift trust is based on benevolence and is built in informal interactions
cognitive trust is built by seeing the work of your team members
affective trust is built by socializing with team members over time.

In remote work,

swift trust is based on qualifications (who are you and why are you on this team?)
cognitive trust is based on reliability (can I depend on you to do what you said you would do?)
affective trust is based on benevolence and is built when there is social content built into task-based communications and there is space created for informal and interpersonal reactions.

Bringing Affective Trust to Online Meetings

If your team has the swift trust and cognitive trust but is missing aspects of the affective trust, here are some ways to bring more of that into online meetings.

Make a request that everyone be off mute (as much as possible – use common sense to balance background noise) and on video. We want to hear the sighs, laughter and interruptions! This is what we’re often missing the most with the mute button. That and waiting for someone to unmute so they can speak.

Normalize ‘collisions’ – 2 or more people talking at one time. They will happen! When it does say your name and sort out who speaks first.

Start with a check-in – ask everyone to speak and share something personal. You can make it fun or edgy and you might build the practice over time. (I very seldom start any meeting, regardless of the topic, without a check-in anymore. I find it totally shifts the space when people can share some personal, even if it’s that they had a great morning and they are ready to get started with the day.)

Create space and an activity where you welcome the ‘crazy ideas’. You might save 15 min at the end of a planning meeting – divide people up and send them into pair breakouts where they can chat about some idea or inspiration that is based on the conversation they just heard in the large group. Ask them to share the ideas on a board or back in the large group.

Bringing Affective Trust Into Your Remote Workspace

Taking It one step further, you can bring affective trust into your remote workspace! Here is how.

Create a random channel in Slack for sharing personal stories or what happened over the weekend
Introduce off topic collaborations
Brainstorm crazy ideas and schedule impromptu opportunities to hear about them

Ways to Create Space of Unplanned Magic

Unplanned magic takes a bit of… planning, for the facilitator, that is!

IDEA: Hold a ‘crazy idea’ day. Plan an informal gathering, and bring your favorite beverage! Then everyone gets 10 minutes to pitch their ‘crazy’ idea.

In principle, you’re looking to build in *space*, slack time in current meetings – or create a new gathering – so you can bring the personal chit chat and connections into the conversations.

Leaders and facilitators will need to create the space and go first, especially if any of this is new to others. You might also need to help others understand why you’re creating the connection time.

To learn more about Virtual Team Facilitation, read this.

How To Best Guide Your Team With Virtual Team Facilitation

Leaders, is your team scattered across the nation, or the globe? Are you struggling to keep your team focussed, cohesive and productive? Whether your team is virtual due to the recent coronavirus pandemic or had been a virtual team by-design, facilitating a team remotely is easy in concept, but more challenging in reality.

Fortunately, TeamCatapult has been in the remote work and remote team facilitation space for a long time! We have experience in this space and have been conducting Virtual Team Facilitation workshops for years.

While attending a recent workshop, attendee Lisa from Get The Picture created this incredible resource for virtual team leaders. This is what was discussed and learned on Day1. At first blush, it’s probably hard to land on a starting point. We’ve outlined some salient points that touch on the flow of the workshop.

Getting Started With Virtual Team Facilitation

The first thing to do when facilitating a virtual team meeting is to reduce distractions. We recommend that attendees do one or all of these:

Silence their phone
Shut the door
Close their email tab

While your team members take care of these things on their end, you as the facilitator should take care of some business as well!

Tips for the Virtual Team Facilitator

1 Display a Welcome Screen

This assures everyone has come to the right place. This also makes everyone feel welcome.

2 Use a Slack channel for Parking Lot

Be sure to clear it out by the end of the day! If you are unfamiliar with this term, the ‘Parking Lot’ is where you post follow up questions and discussions that might lead you on a path away from what you are teaching at the moment.

Noting the responses and answers about any of the items and ‘clearing’ them at the end of the day validates the importance of questions without cutting into the formal workshop time.

3 Use a Virtual Circle in Mural to Open

You can use photos of attendees, and invite people to ‘sit next to someone’. Once everyone is seated in the circle (virtual) take time for everyone to introduce themselves. Again, this helps new attendees feel welcome and wanted.

4 Use Breakout Rooms in Zoom

Ask people to reach you in Slack if you are needed during the breakout session. Zoom breakout rooms are a great way to have small group discussions among attendees. We use these rooms so teams can work on simulations while capturing notes in Mural.

Timezones, Technology and Ground Rules

There are things that can go wrong when using technology, from the challenge of varying time zones, to not being able to connect, to having unstable Wifi. Expect these issues, but be sure to set ground rules!

Set and Scribe Ground Rules

Be in a quiet place
Be off mute
Be on video
Be on time
Pay attention

Ask: ‘What do you need of me?’ and ‘What do you need of each other?’

Include ways to handle collisions. For example – be clear how you will handle two people speaking at once. It does happen so have a plan in place from the beginning.

Low Stakes Virtual Team Facilitation

Often times meetings can get into a “high-stakes” atmosphere, where there are, simply put, conflicts within the team on an issue. The question for a facilitator is how will you slow things down and make it feel low stakes and safe to continue on with the conflict?

Here are three solutions:

Narrate
Chunk instructions
Normalize

Use Question Prompts to Incite Curiosity

Get people outside of their normal ways of thinking about their work! Using question prompts gets attendees to open up and participate and move beyond what’s may have them stuck on how to talk about and resolve a topic.

Virtual Team Facilitation Design Tips!

Here are 3 design tips that might help you organize your next virtual meeting.

Resist the urge to jump to tools
Test… is a meeting actually needed?
Use offline time to do work!

Learn More About Virtual Team Facilitation!

To find out more about Virtual Team Facilitation, check out what Lisa learned on Day 2 of the Virtual Team Facilitation Workshop!

We are grateful for Lisa’s willingness to share these visuals with you, our audience, to provide you with a glimpse into the world of Virtual Team Facilitation

Whether it is you, your leadership team, or your company that needs help with Virtual Team Facilitation, TeamCatapult is able to lend a hand.

Please contact us today for more information for both private and public Virtual Facilitation Masterclass workshops.

How To Lead in a Connected but Separate Space

What Can Make Online Learning Challenging?

By: Marsha Acker, Antoinette Coetzee, Kay Harper, and Kari McLeod

As we’ve been having conversations with many of you over the past few weeks, we thought we would share and normalize some of the concerns that we’ve heard from you regarding online learning. We understand that you might naturally be feeling hesitant about an online experience. After all, there is no lack of online options these days!

We at TeamCatapult love connecting with people in a room. We care deeply about creating a space for deep learning through experiences, reflections, and conversations. We feel a connection with our class participants, the teams we coach, and the working session participants we facilitate. We take the time to get to know others.

TeamCatapult has been teaching a workshop called “Virtual Facilitation Masterclass” for the past four years. We co-created this course with Rachel Smith, an expert in Virtual Work and Remote Online learning and in partnership with The Grove, pioneers of visual and virtual collaboration, to help fill a gap we saw as the workplace included more remote and distributed teams. Experienced, in-the-room facilitators were wondering, “How do I translate that into leading engaging collaboration in a virtual environment?”

With the public health measures in place to stall the Coronavirus and COVID-19 Pandemic, we have decided to pivot and present all our courses in a virtual setting for the foreseeable future. Which means we will apply the same advanced techniques we teach in the Virtual Facilitation Masterclass to bring our attendees the very best virtual experience in all our workshops.

Fact: Online Learning Will Not Be The Same As in the Room

That is right! Online and in-person learning experiences are different.

However, difference does not necessarily mean less-than. First and foremost, you can’t simply “copy-paste” a course designed with the intention of in-person training into an online format.

Virtual space creates different energy–energy that takes a mindset and skill to design and facilitate. The key is that successful virtual leaders examine the intent of what they are trying to accomplish and aren’t merely fixated on porting in-the-room techniques to an online medium.

The protocols when working online are different and take some getting used to, but once you have gone through the initial learning curve, the rewards extend way beyond the workshop.

Fact: We Cannot Bring Our Entire Physical Being to an Online Workshop

When we meet one another in person there are a lot of physical cues that help us create connection. In the type of classes we teach at TeamCatapult, we need connection to grow, and that grows into trust, in order to create the optimum conditions for transformational learning. One of the concerns we’ve heard is that people just don’t like “online;” they feel disconnected from others.

We cannot bring our entire physical being to an online workshop. Well, not yet, anyway! Yet we all have experiences of building connections with people we have never met in person–someone you’ve only exchanged emails or letters with, the characters we see in movies, or our favorite celebrity chef or musical artist. In some cases the connection may be one-way, but it grows because we get to know the person, understand and resonate with them.

Creating connection virtually is one of the things that we are called to do especially now that so much of our work is online via email, Slack, Zoom, Mural, and the like. And from connection, we need to build trust.

There are three stages of building trust in remote teams, all of which can be applied to online learning: swift trust, cognitive trust, and affective trust.

Trust builds differently with remote teams than in-person teams. We use our virtual team facilitation experience to build trust with participants, the same way we teach you to do so.

We start with a brief check-in, not just at the start of the day, but after breaks and lunch. We establish spaces where people can connect informally. In our training, we do this through asking people to Zoom in before class starts and we set up Slack channels that aren’t directly related to the course. As our participants start to connect, we make sure to bring their brief social exchanges into their working sessions. We divide these working sessions into whole-group, small-group, and paired discussions. That’s right! Effective remote meetings and trainings have participants doing things with one another. This too builds trust.

In our online workshops, we guide you to growing your mindset and acquiring the skills to build connection and trust in your teams, which you then take what you’ve learned back to your organizations. You will help your teams, not just while they are working from home because of Coronavirus, but in the future when work is bound to look different than it did two months ago.

Fact: Facilitation and Coaching Skills Can Be Learned Online

We hold two beliefs about the concern whether skills like facilitation and coaching can be learned online.

First, we cannot train others in something that we have not achieved some level of mastery. For that reason, all of our faculty are certified professional coaches, and trained or certified facilitators, and have their own practice of facilitation and coaching with teams. The deep experience of our faculty is what allows each of us to pivot easily in the moment, work with what shows up in a group, and have leadership range in how we co-create and lead an engaging learning environment.

Our second belief about this concern is that no one can teach you facilitation and coaching simply by providing a course. We can provide key principles. We can help you understand your own mindset and beliefs about these competencies. But, you will only truly learn them by doing them. So practice, practice, practice is a fundamental component to our curriculum. In our virtual classes, you will have the opportunity to practice facilitation and coaching in a safe learning space, and give and get feedback. We set you up for success in growing your mindset and practicing these skills for when you return to work the following day or week. The same opportunities we provide in our in-person classes, with an added benefit of getting to practice with remote collaboration tools! What better time to practice these skills virtually when you will be using them virtually for work.

Fact: Online Learning With TeamCatapult Does Not Mean You Sit and Stare at a Screen for 8 Hours Straight!

Virtual work is more taxing than we think it’s going to be. How can it be so tiring just sitting in a chair, looking at a computer screen, typing, and talking on Zoom calls?

We promise: TeamCatapult virtual classes will not have you sitting for the entire class.

We build in more frequent and longer breaks than you may be used to in both in-person and virtual training.
You’ll have time to go for a walk at lunch and prepare a real meal.
You’ll be able to check-in with kids doing homework and pet your dog during our breaks.

In our ICAgile Facilitation and Coaching classes, we’ll even have you up and moving around a few times during the class. All of this is designed to give your brain and body a break. Not only will you have more energy for the class, these longer breaks create the time and space that allows what you’ve learned to settle and stick.

The Benefits of Online Learning!

While online learning certainly is not the same as learning in the room, there are numerous ways online learning might be a better fit for you than learning in the room.

Learning and Teaching Online Will Be a Must-Have Skill Moving Forward

As leaders and managers our way of working is changing.

What will your leadership and management style look like in a year from now? None of us knows the answer to that, but what we do know is that our way of working will change. There is a strong possibility that for the foreseeable future we will not be gathering in a room with 15-20 people to learn and collaborate together.

The same will be true for your teams.

How will you lead in a remote world? How will you connect with people? How will you engage a remote team?

The experience you need to make these changes can be learned in our classes and then be applied to your own team.

Introverts Unite; Online Learning Was Made For You!

Our world of work and learning is highly biased towards those with a preference for extroversion. Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, writes about how brainstorming, meetings, learning and work all have a bias towards extroversion (click here for a short article).

In our online programs we certainly do ask people to come prepared to speak, listen, contribute and “play-in.” The experience is different than it is in-person though. We often put participants in small break-out groups where the discussion is in a quiet and private space. You don’t hear the conversation from other groups in the room, which lessens distraction and increases your opportunity to focus and engage.

In a room with others it’s easy to be distracted by what other people are doing or not doing. Online you can turn off your camera and mute your microphone and truly have a quiet moment. We have also designed even more reflective exercises in our online classes, giving everyone the quiet space to reflect and take notes.

Getting to Know the Whole Person

We could jump for joy over this benefit! For decades we’ve watched leaders struggle with this concept of “my work self” and “my home self” and that somehow those are different. It’s almost like there’s a belief that one can put on a work suit (armor?) and go off to work and then come home and be a completely different person. This is a false duality because we are whole human beings. The more we try to suppress one side of ourselves at work, the less joyful, authentic and real we feel. It’s been our experience that this is the source of many interpersonal conflicts at work.

What we’ve seen in our online learning spaces is that the whole person is coming to our courses–mainly because we don’t have a choice!

We see people wearing sweatshirts rather than dress shirts, sitting at kitchen tables (or in their closet just to find a quiet place), being interrupted by determined and loving pets, and laughing as kids go streaking through the background in diapers or coming in for a quick hug.

While all of those things could be viewed as distractions, we incorporate them and make them okay. These are all opportunities to get to know one another more deeply.

We know that trust builds more quickly when we know people more personally. When the right conditions are present and people are willing to fully show up, our online learning experience creates deeper connections between people than in the room.

The Future of TeamCatapult Workshops

Just like you, with the Coronavirus and COVID-19 Pandemic, we’re continuing to experiment, innovate and challenge our own learning edges. We’ve moved most of our workshops online, but we haven’t done it at the expense of lessening the learning or the experience for participants!

As we continue to sense and respond to the pandemic, we will keep your learning experience at the core of our experimentation and innovation.

We hope you’ll join us as we chart a path towards the future of leading in a connected, but separate space.