Gridworks Virtual Facilitation Best Practices
| We’re all adapting to best practices to keep everyone healthy and for many of us, that means transferring our in-person gatherings to virtual platforms. At Gridworks, we are refining our virtual facilitation skills and offer this short list of best practices and lessons learned. We would be happy to share our experiences in more detail – please don’t hesitate to reach out if we can support you in these changing time. |
We’re using Zoom to host our virtual meetings. Functions like the chat box, breakout rooms, and polls help engage the audience and enable productive meetings. Tip: Be aware of your calendar – On shared accounts, only one device can be actively logged in at a time, so you can’t schedule overlapping meetings on the same account, and if another device signs in while a meeting is running, the host and meeting can be interrupted. Test your tools the day before and let your audience know ahead of time if they need to download anything or register for a webinar. Tip: Be sure to replicate the audience experience when testing tools. This means trying them from incognito windows, without being signed in to any accounts that might give you special access. Virtual meetings and related discussions should be shorter than when held in-person. We become more fatigued when sitting in front of the computer so remember to take a stretch break every 30 minutes. Tip: Encourage your audience to take stretch breaks together – lead a stretch break virtually as you would in person. Take 10 minutes at the end of each meeting to get immediate feedback. The quickest way to know how you’re doing is to ask in real time! Tip: Virtual meetings will take a little extra planning to meet your needs. Consider ways to make virtual more human as we’re all adapting to a more distant connection. |
