Working online without that face to face connection requires well-thought tools, processes, and facilitation to succeed. Check out our blog for best practices when working fully online.
Meetings and workshops need more structure and focus on facilitation now that we are all working and collaborating online. This is where the role of Scrum Master really comes to play. Read our blog post about the importance of Scrum Master for more insight into why we think it’s such an important role.
Enabling teams to collaborate is the key to achieve alignment, which is, in turn, imperative for getting results in a large organization. Below you find two common symptoms for when your meetings and workshops aren’t as effective as they could be.
People working on other things in parallel or dropping off from calls
Working online sometimes makes it difficult for people to concentrate as there might be other family members and pets calling for attention. Also, it might be tempting to work on several things in parallel. You might be participating in an online meeting and simultaneously chatting over Slack while writing an email to someone, and updating a presentation for an upcoming meeting.
In a physical meeting, the meeting space itself provides some shelter from many of these distractions, so when facilitating an online session, extra care needs to be taken to ensure that participants are engaged and focused.
Only the loud ones are heard
Even without meeting online, it can sometimes be a challenge to ensure that everyone gets heard in a meeting or workshop. Some people tend to talk more than others, and as a facilitator, it is important to ensure that participants get equally heard. The less vocal participants often have important and very valid viewpoints that provide meaningful insights to a meeting.
In an online setting, this becomes even more difficult to ensure as some people might be very uncomfortable talking to people they don’t see in real life. Collaboration tooling becomes important (for instance use of video to also see each other) and active facilitation by securing that everyone has the opportunity to speak.
How can we help you?
Facilitation online puts even higher demands on the facilitator than when facilitating a physical event. We know people by heart and have real-world experience to facilitate effective events both online and physically.
We can help you to facilitate online sessions, for instance, when:
You have teams without Scrum Masters
You are organized in teams of teams without anyone taking on the role of Chief Scrum Master or Release Train Engineer (RTE)
There are Product Owners who would like to focus on the business content and prioritization, but need help with facilitation – we will give you a lift-up that helps you to thrive!
Your people may need a neutral but experienced person outside their organization to talk to and get guidance from – offer them external coaching from us to help alleviate the anxiety of working online.
Don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@nitor.com if you need help facilitating meetings and team events online.
Andreas Tjernsten is on a quest for more effective, efficient and happy organizations where people thrive. He has worked with product and service development in large organizations for over 20 years and learned from many mistakes while changing the way work is done. Andreas is a certified SAFe SPC, appreciated coach and trainer of Lean & Agile thinking, tools and practices.
