How to become a better Facilitator
I recently coordinated and hosted a Miro webinar called “Focus on Facilitators” with 3 expert facilitators. Whether you are looking to facilitate your first remote workshop or uplevel your facilitation skills, these takeaways and resources will be handy.
Planning your first remote workshop as a novice facilitator
During my user research sessions I learned that facilitating an online workshop for the first time feels intimidating. Laura Ward, Principal Design Researcher at PayPal, reduces the pressure on the facilitator by saying:
“There is no mistake that you can’t recover from during or after the workshop”
Her facilitation recipe involves a thorough preparation, asking for feedback early and often, following your intuition and giving out some control by letting the group decide what to do next or how to adapt the original plan when things don’t run as expected.
Do not under-estimate the time required to prepare a well structured workshop. Ana Kyra, co-founder of Servis 8 and partner at The Co-Creation School, shared “It takes more time to prepare for an online interaction, compared to offline, than you would think”. She advises to take breaks every 45 mins to avoid participant fatigue and budget 30% extra time in your workshop agenda to account for extra discussions and technical difficulties.
For your first workshops, consider using co-facilitators who can help you with some of the tasks like taking attendance, managing the timing or even adapting the plan. For the latter, Laura privately nominates a “Chief Decision Officer” who she convenes with during breaks if she isn’t clear what her next steps should be.
Justin Mertes, a coach and lead facilitator at Crema, argues that even if you are new to facilitation and lack confidence to lead a group, you should have a plan and stick to it in order to prevent the group from feeling constant decision fatigue.
“It’s the facilitator’s job to make workshop decisions. Facilitators can forget how much people like to be told what they have to do in workshops”
Some best practices to facilitate workshops using Miro
Organize your workshop board using a frame for each activity. You can find inspiration in some Miroverse templates. Create a welcome section to have participants learn the basics of Miro before the workshop. Check these Miro onboarding board examples that you can copy into your workshop board. And just in case they don’t go over them, prepare an easy and fun ice-breaker that allows participants to create and move sticky notes. Justin believes that using dark backgrounds can feel more welcoming and easy on the eyes, especially for long full-day workshops.
Written instructions are super important as it is often difficult to know if people are confused or need clarification on exercises. Make them big and clear enough and refer to them when you present a new exercise. Use Miro Timer to keep everybody on track and add 1 or 5 extra minutes if you see they need to finish up something. Add a background music to help people concentrate and be comfortable with the silence.
It’s hard to keep the attention of all participants throughout the entire workshop. To ease navigation of your board, give a name or number to each frame to make it easier to identify. If you want to make it more fun, give participants freedom to explore the board on their own by creating a journey using links and arrows, a bar or chill-out area. You can create links between any Miro objects or frames. Copy your destination link by right-clicking on any object and clicking on “copy link”; and then link your origin to your destination by right-clicking on the origin object and then clicking on “Link to”.
Finally, share your board as a public board so any participant can join as a guest-editor without needing to create an account or pay for a Day pass. If you have a Free plan, add participants to your team instead of using the public boards.
How participatory do you want to make your workshop?
The workshop design should start with your workshop audience and goals at the core of it. Before you start planning the workshop, ask your audience: “How familiar are you with tools like Miro?”
If the answer is “not familiar at all”, Justin advises for a less participatory dynamic: “I’ve come to learn that unless the team I am workshopping with uses Miro on a regular basis, they don’t need to be active on the Miro board. I would rather share my screen so that they can view what’s happening and really focus on the problem at hand… Otherwise they are trying to learn a new tool, which inevitably makes it difficult for them to be fully mentally engaged with the problem we’re there to solve in the first place”.
For Laura’s context of a larger corporation, she suggests investing a little extra time so her stakeholders get a more engaging experience: ”Working at a large company, I insist on people learning the tool so they can do more collaborative meetings. I start most meetings with an ice-breaker that will help them learn how to create and move a sticky note”.
Curious to see the webinar recording? Check it out here!
Have you tried any of these tips? What other best practices can you share? What challenges are you facing? Please share them in the comments!
About the author
Eduardo Gomez Ruiz is a UX Research Lead at Miro specialized in multi-market research studies to deliver strategic insights to Product and Business Leaders. He is currently focused on building products to empower teams to co-create the next big thing.
Before Miro, he worked at Uber — where he led the creation of the Loyalty program Uber Pro — and at various Design & Innovation agencies.
