Deliver a bespoke training in the skills and tools to confidently run excellent online meetings
Training
The brief
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, our client’s team increasingly organised online meetings for their clients. These included presentations, working group meetings, and strategy or decision-making discussions. The team needed to know how to handle these crucial online sessions more effectively.
They wanted a tailored training course that would be valuable to their entire staff – from junior consultants to founding partners – with varying degrees of experience and confidence. The course had to fit within the staff’s busy and varied schedules.
What we did
We designed a training over three half days, focusing on the four key areas identified by the team itself:
- Better design and plan online meetings
- Deliver highly engaging meetings
- Follow up and evaluate their meetings’ impact
- And build the team’s confidence as online hosts
We crafted the course to cover basic tech skills, such as how to use WebEx – their software of choice – and Mural, a well-known online whiteboard. We built in activities to let participants run an online meeting first-hand, and get the trainers’ and their peers’ feedback, increasing both their experience and confidence.
We delivered
The online training course covered general principles as well as tiny-but-meaningful aspects when facilitating online: how should you use your voice? How can we reach a decision? What if participants don’t engage? What if something unplanned happens?
The team learnt that the keys are preparation and adaptability. It’s about how you set up and hold the virtual stage to create and keep the audience’s attention.
Participants had to design and run short meetings themselves to put into practice the material they had learnt. Putting people in front of a friendly crowd gave them an opportunity to experience balancing the voices and ideas in the room, keeping to time, and moving people towards a shared outcome – all with constructive feedback at the end.
Where
Online (first year)
In person and online (second year)
“My only regret about this training is that we didn’t do it sooner. These three half-days of online training were engaging, entertaining, and rich in learning.”
– A senior manager
Impact and feedback
Overall, participants showed a 95% satisfaction rate about the training itself.
After the training, participants’ self-assessed skills increased by 63% (from 2.8/5 to 4.6/5) across the four key areas compared to pre-training data.
The training course was repeated two years later to refresh the team’s memory, and provide the same skillset to newer team members.
