Learning and Collaboration in the Time of Corona

I'm sure this joke has been made already, along with that awaited "My Sharona" parody we're hoping Weird Al will birth into existence. Regardless, this is a reality many companies have found themselves in. For the first time in quarantine / pandemic history, technology has well-positioned the world to keep going - however, this area can be very new to most. I'm hoping that in this post, I can talk through some of the options you have in terms of pivoting learning events and collaboration using the tech at your disposal. I'll also talk briefly at the end about creating working agreements for the WFH weeks ahead.

And in the comments, I'd love to hear how your company is tackling this time, how your working norms are affected, or any tricks / tips you've found in utilizing a more virtual working style. Ok, let's get into it!

Getting people engaged - the bread and butter of all learning experiences and collaborative meetings. Here's a list of tools I've utilized over the last couple of weeks and use cases that highlight various approaches:

Zoom

I don't know how I didn't really dig into Zoom until last year. It has some amazing functionality that I feel will be integral to my L&D world moving forward. The free version still comes with some good functionality, but the meetings are capped at 100 participants and can only last 40 minutes. For most, this will still do the necessary job. Here are some of my favorite features, we engaged with in our most recent set of virtual workshops:

1. Host / Cohost - They use a "host as moderator" approach which allows one host and any number of deemed cohosts to mute and unmute other participants, create and launch breakout rooms (host only), change base settings of the room, record the call (mp4 / m4a recordings), and a handful of other minor settings. It comes in handy when you're working with 15+ people in a call, as that can get very chaotic if someone isn't running the show in the background. And if, as a host, you have to leave during the meeting, you can hand off your host-power to someone else in the room.
2. Non-verbal feedback - For those larger group sizes (15+) non-verbal feedback will be a lifesaver. In the Participants panel, folks can immediately reply with reactions like "yes," "no," "go slower," "go faster," a thumbs up, thumbs down, clapping, "need a break," and an away marker. We used these to take quick temperature checks of the room - "Is everyone ready to move on?" "Was that enough time to read through the materials?" For moderators, it tallies the total amount of responses in the bottom of the participants panel for an at-a-glance pulse check of the room. Another amazing reaction is to "raise hand." It gives individuals within a sea of attendees the ability to indicate they want to share and to find appropriate moments to unmute and engage. We use this to moderate questions prior to starting activities, highlight any clarifying points during a presentation, and to engage share-backs to wrap up activities. Reactions will also stay next to an individual's name until they or the moderator clears them.
3. Breakout rooms - If I could marry a feature, it'd be this one. I'm going to spend a little more time talking about this, because it's just so versatile in terms of how you can utilize it. Breakout rooms are a way to divide up the larger Zoom call into smaller groups (of a size that the host determines). You can set who goes into what room, whether folks can leave the room on their own, and how long it'll give them to leave when you "close" the breakout rooms. Once in the breakout rooms, each group has their own private instance of chat. We just utilized this functionality in a series of workshops that had 100-160 participants in each - an activity would be set up in the main room, we would send folks into breakout rooms to ideate, answer questions, etc (using tools I'll cover later) and then if anyone had trouble or needed help, they would use the "ask for help" button in their room. This notified me as the moderator and I was free to send a cohost (who I didn't sort into a room) to assist. The cohost could then leave the room as they saw fit. The host can also send "broadcasts" to the rooms - we used this to keep time during the activities and move folks from one beat to another. I did find that we had to remind folks on timing more frequently (once a minute) because they sometimes missed the broadcast when it came in. Overall feedback we received was that folks were impressed that we managed to get small group participation happening in such a large crowd of people, kept folks engaged for the duration (it was a four-hour workshop), and wanted to know how they could use this tool for themselves.
4. Whiteboarding - This is a feature I found a better solution to (covered later), but it's worth discussing. When screen sharing, you can select to start a whiteboard where you can... whiteboard. It's fairly one-sided as the only person who can interact with it will be the person sharing it. Sometimes, though, that's enough to get the job done, especially if you're trying to verbally describe something that's better shown visually.
5. Various view options - Zoom brings a handful of choices for viewing. Gallery view shows all thumbnails of folks and their video - up to 49 on the screen at once (I prefer this view over...). Speaker view is tiny thumbs of folks / videos up at the top of the window and the person with the most recently active mic is featured as a larger video. Pin video allows an individual to make one video featured over others, which will only show up for themselves. Spotlight video is done by the host and allows them to choose what video they want everyone else to see. And Side-by-side mode is used when screen sharing to show both the shared screen as well as other participants.

• The challenges we saw with using a virtual learning platform - some folks just aren't accustomed to this format. Let me preface by saying that I'm not super surprised - if only because we haven't flexed into this area much (as an industry). It's happening, don't get me wrong, but when people hear "virtual session" they immediately assume it'll be a lecture for the length of the meeting. When folks joined without a microphone, joined on their phone or tablet, actively took other conference calls in the middle of the session, or sometimes just walked away from their computer, it greatly reduced their ability to participate in the session and even obtain the base knowledge from the presentation - and at times impacted the experience of other attendees.
• Things we could do better moving forward - kicking off the session by spending more time (~5 minutes) discussing the virtual platform and how we're planning on using it. Setting those baseline expectations of what we need from folks who are in the (virtual) room, and making it clear that if they don't follow those guidelines, we'll have to take action to preserve the experience for others; either put them "on hold" (another fun feature) or completely remove them from the workshop.

Google Suite

The ability to simultaneously collaborate shines through using tools within the Google Suite. Although there are no paid aspects to these, if your company isn't working within the Google Suite, you'll have folks joining using personal accounts. So if you're covering more sensitive materials, this might not be the solution for you. I'm going to cover only a few of the tools we use (or have used) in learning, just know there's more if you want to go looking.

1. Google Docs - We built a more locked-down version of a doc to act as a virtual workbook for each workshop. Folks could create their own copy and follow along / take notes as we went through the presentation. This was more passive engagement. For collaboration, we start with a Google Doc and invite our whole team to open it up, then add their thoughts. We trade off note-taking and building upon outlines so it isn't just one person who is doing all the scribing and people can contribute when they feel the need. Additionally, the use of comments and "suggesting" are wonderful ways to provide feedback and collaborate on a single doc.
2. Google Slides - This was easily the biggest game-changer and the most (unintended) collaborative virtual tool I've encountered. It's not using Slides as intended (for presentations), but instead as a virtual whiteboard (handily beating out Zoom's whiteboard feature). Most recently, during our workshop, we kicked folks a link to a slide I created in Google Slides then asked attendees to create post-it notes around a prompt in real time with their group (this idea I actually got from a wonderful experience during an IdeoU course). At other times, we've done affinity mapping, taking items / ideas and grouping them, then collaborating on a theme we see. People can draw with the "Squiggles" tool in the Shapes panel to make it like an ACTUAL whiteboard. It's a launch pad into a larger and deeper conversation and engages folks in a way most don't expect to be engaged virtually. There are so many applications within this, its only limit is what you want to do with it.
3. Google Forms - Creating a form for folks to fill out during a workshop or collaborative meeting can be valuable, but if you want that instant feedback to go to the attendees, then you should keep scrolling to learn more about Slido. For things like ongoing workshop feedback or long form input, this is a great five minute closing activity, to direct folks to a quick survey that allows them to share their experience. As we shift into a new formats of interaction (like this virtual landscape), surveying folks on their experience and ability to share their ideas will be important to adapt working styles and approaches to make everyone feel included.

• The challenges - For our more collaboration-heavy activities that required aggressive timing, the load bearing on Slides was massive. Once we had more than 35 individuals in a slide at once, creating post-its and adding text became a hot, laggy mess. For the docs we created in Google Docs, we built them for printing, which means some were in landscape format (but being viewed in portrait). It resulted in some head-tilting during the session that was (definitely funny, but) not super intuitive or easy to engage.
• Things we could do better moving forward - Consider capping virtual collaboration activities to 30 people per group - the pros we got out of making the groups large were outweighed by the cons of the inability to actually participate in the activity. Also, creating workshop materials with the specific experience in mind (img rotation, yay).

Slido

For additional engagement moments (especially across large groups of people) we used a polling / crowdsourcing tool called Slido. Whereas other tools I've just covered have had little to no cost to get the necessary functionality, Slido does have a pay barrier, but it's a really really tiny pay barrier. Like a pay curb. You get most everything you need with the free version, so I'll note in the features below the difference between free and paid.

1. Creating Events - This is free and can engage up to 1000 participants. I do feel for anyone who has to run a session with 1k+ participants, if you need a shoulder to cry on, I'm here. For most folks, this will be more than enough. You only get the bump to 5k participants per event at the highest tier.
2. Crowdsource questions, Polling, and Brainstorming - I really appreciate that attendees can engage with these features anonymously. We utilized crowdsourcing of questions to lead a Q&A in our most recent workshops. Folks can submit questions (Twitter character limit of 160) and then "thumbs up" questions they'd like to see answered and we pull from the top of the pile until we run out of Q&A time. It's efficient and clean. We also created two separate "rooms" for crowdsourcing questions since we had two very distinct topics. You can swap between rooms to preserve responses while providing a clean slate for attendees. Polling isn't something I've dug into much yet, however I have plans for this in smaller group settings for engagement moments. Imagine using this for a self-awareness team activity and having folks self-select where they think their team skews, then doing the reveal. Or doing a more involved pulse-check about how folks are feeling. There's a Quiz feature currently in beta, which I plan on using in at least one upcoming session. When it comes to brainstorming, I still lean heavily on the Google Suite as my go-to, as it's more visual + flexible, and less restrictive in terms of what you can do. For the free version, you get as many crowdsourced questions as your participants' hearts desire, three polls per event and one brainstorm. For most events, this will likely do the job, unless you're looking longer format or plan on having more points of polling engagement.
3. Data exporting - This is a paid-only feature that I feel is almost imperative if you plan on collecting any sort of information post-"event." This will give you an event summary report (includes everything on the analytics page), all of the questions asked, the replies to questions asked, ideas generated, poll results, and poll results per user. Since we did Q&A, I exported the questions asked so we could use them in an FAQ, even if we didn't get around to answering all of them.
4. Embedding - Thankfully, embedding of a poll or brainstorm into a presentation is free. This is wonderful if you're engaging attendees in a poll and want your currently presented slide to update results live. It gives instant feedback to folks and provides a platform for discussion.
5. Privacy - This is another aspect that's behind a pay wall and could be a deal breaker depending on the sensitivity of your content - you can't add in a password to join your event until you hit the first pay tier. Once you purchase that tier, you can use a password or SSO (single sign on). I was impressed with how easily SSO worked with Slido, although this does default to having folks use their name when submitting ideas / questions (they can turn this off if they'd like, but it's an additional step).

• The challenges - we didn't run into many challenges with Slido. User interface was very intuitive, folks were pretty comfortable navigating to the site and inputting their questions.
• Things we could do better moving forward - I think providing more of a variety of engagement. We didn't do the slide embed, mostly due to timing and wanting to stress test it before we tried it. There are more aspects of functionality that we need to engage with to get the full value out of the tool.

Working Agreements

If you're unfamiliar with working agreements, let me do an elevator pitch for why they should exist. When you go into a working relationship with an individual or a team, knowing the expectations you all have of each other is foundational to building trust, feeling heard, and showing respect toward your colleagues. That's accomplished through a working agreement. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, now let's get into how you think about working agreements in regards to a virtual environment.

• What does WFH mean and look like to everyone? Have a discussion with your team around this prompt. Encourage people to be honest about the constraints they'll face - this could mean some unideal work setups, lack of privacy, or altered work hours. Use Google Slides to ideate around what working from home actually looks like for each person.
• What does WFH effectively mean to everyone on your team? This can be a different answer than what it was like to work in the office and is dependent on everyone's preferences. For some, having heads down time will give them the best chance at being effective. Others may want the option to quickly hop on a call to clarify things over voice chat instead of text. Work that some folks do may require multiple iterations, driven by quick feedback cycles. Maybe meeting once in the morning to understand the work for the day (Agile pls) will help keep folks on track. You need to determine with your team what "effective" looks like.
• How will your team need to accommodate to ensure everyone can work effectively? Now that you have the landscape of what folks' WFH situations are like as well as what it means to everyone to be effective, come up with the "how" your team will work together. As you look for solutions to specific needs, you may branch out to other tools like Slack, Discord, Trello, etc.

From the answers to these questions, you'll create empathy towards the unique situations facing each individual on your team and their environment. The final question will provide the working agreement - how your team will continue to function, even in a virtual setting.

Thanks for taking the time to read, hopefully some aspect of this has helped someone out there in LinkedIn Land. As I said earlier, please comment with any tricks / tips / tools you love engaging in a virtual work environment and feel free to share how your company is tackling this WFH experience / how your working norms are affected.