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12 Best Virtual Meeting Tools

Virtual meetings have become the lifeblood of modern work and collaboration. Whether you're hosting a team meeting, conducting a client presentation, or facilitating a workshop, the right virtual meeting tools can make all the difference in productivity, engagement, and overall success. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the 12 best virtual meeting tools for 2023, each offering unique features to enhance your online interactions and run more productive online meetings. In a remotely distributed, always-online world, virtual meetings are the norm. On a typical week, more than 50% of employees spend between one and three hours in virtual meetings. That’s a lot of time spent looking at cameras and screens! …

How to run a virtual workshop

Virtual workshops are a powerful tool for bringing together participants from around the world and collaboratively achieving your goals. But how do they work? What are the best practices for running engaging virtual sessions that keep Zoom fatigue at bay and create genuine innovation and solve problems? Whether you're a team leader, business professional, or facilitator, knowing how to plan and run a virtual workshop effectively is a valuable skill in today's digital landscape. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through how to run a virtual workshop that is engaging and impactful. What is a virtual workshop? A virtual workshop is an interactive and collaborative process that is conducted…

18 Free Facilitation Resources We Think You’ll Love

Facilitation is more and more recognized as a key component of work, as employers and society are faced with bigger and more complex problems and ideas. From facilitating meetings to big, multi-stakeholder strategy development workshops, the facilitator's skillset is more and more in demand. In this article, we will go through a list of the best online facilitation resources, including newsletters, podcasts, communities, and 10 free toolkits you can bookmark and read to upskill and improve your facilitation practice. When designing activities and workshops, you'll probably start by using templates and methods you are familiar with. Soon enough, you'll need to expand your range and look for facilitation methods and…

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Free Online Resources for Soft Skills Training Material

What are the best free online resources for soft skills training materials? We are going to help you to answer this question below! As a trainer, educator or facilitator, you have probably experienced that good icebreakers, exercises, and energizer games are essential for an engaging and effective soft skills training. Soft skills training programs may include different topics, such as effective communication, time management, emotional intelligence, presentation skills, active listening and more. They may be short or part of a more comprehensive program. Certainly, being directed to adult learners, they must include hands-on practice and engaging activities for skill development. It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for…

19 Best Free Workshop Resources

Meetings and workshops are where collaborative learning happens. Whether they end up being useful or a waste of time depends a lot on how they are designed. A diversity of workshop activities and balanced mix of group facilitation techniques are essential for any facilitated session, be it a strategic workshop, a team retreat, a kick-off meeting, a co-creation session or a regular project meeting. It takes careful consideration to pick the right interactive workshop resources for your session, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, profile of participants, and available time. You may already have some favorite exercises for different types of events, but as…

25 Agile Games to improve team performance and collaboration

Whether you’re a seasoned Agile coach looking for effective Agile games, or a facilitator borrowing the Agile framework for team projects, I invite you to bookmark this page. Done? Thank you! Let’s read on. The Agile methodology has revolutionised the way teams approach project management by emphasizing the importance of flexibility. This 2022 report states that after adopting Agile, companies have experienced a 60% growth in revenue and profit. Agile teams are reported to be 25% more productive, and 88% of workers believe Agile improves their quality of life. But is it hard to adopt? When I first studied Agile, my main concern was that it would be complicated. After…

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How to use room setup styles to maximize engagement

Engagement and participation are two key words that every facilitator, event organizer and meeting professional sets as a goal when designing meetings, training sessions or conferences. Room setup plays a big role in making engagement happen. Room setup is the seating arrangement of participants: the placement by which they receive content and interact with one another. It is a critical aspect of every event because the atmosphere the physical space creates will impact the experience in obvious, and subtle, ways. As an event begins, there’s always an invisible barrier between a speaker and their audience. In fact, there is also a psychological barrier among participants, especially when they do not…

How to become a great workshop facilitator

Facilitation skills can be applied in a variety of contexts, such as meetings, events, or in the classroom. Arguably, the setting in which facilitation skills shine the most is the design and running of workshops. Workshops are dedicated spaces for interaction and learning. They are generally very hands-on, including activities such as simulations or games designed to practice specific skills. Leading workshops is an exciting, rewarding experience! In this piece we will go through some of the essential elements of workshop facilitation: What are workshops? Workshops are a time set aside for a group of people to learn new skills, come up with the best ideas, and solve problems together.…

29 online energizers for more engaging meetings

Online energizers are one of best way to beat virtual fatigue. Meeting for extended periods in a virtual environment and looking at a screen all day is draining! Keeping participants engaged in online settings is a challenge but by using games and activities, we can improve engagement and outcomes too. In live settings, facilitators often use activities to increase group energy and focus. These energizers might include physical activity, encourage creative thinking, or simply create space for fun. Here’s a secret: the same can be true in online workshops and remote meetings! While connecting virtual teams over video chat and other online tools has become the norm, too many teams…

59 Ice Breaker Games [That Your Team Won’t Find Cheesy]

Whether it's kicking off a meeting or getting to know new team members, an effective ice breaker game can help set the right tone and help build connections. But how do you choose the right one? In this post, we'll share a collection of tried and tested ice breaker games you can use to engage and energize groups of any size. Whether you just want to have fun, encourage team building or level-up your meetings, there's an activity here for you. An in-depth study from TINYpulse, an employee engagement company, studied more than 40,000 workers' inputs from more than 300 companies globally. They found a correlation of 0.92 between employee…

Workshop design 101: how to craft a successful agenda design

So, you’ve decided to convene a workshop, a special time set aside to work with a team on a certain topic or project. You are looking for brilliant ideas, new solutions and, of course, great participation. To begin the process that will get you to workshop success, you’ll need three ingredients: participants willing to join, someone to facilitate and guide them through the process (aka, you) and a detailed agenda or schedule of the activities you’ve planned. In this article we will focus on that last point: what makes a good agenda design? Having a good agenda is essential to ensure your workshops are well prepared and you can lead…

12 leadership roles for effective, dynamic leaders

While leaders might appear to occupy a single position, the reality is that leaders often need to be fluid and shift leadership roles in order to effectively manage and empower their team. Sometimes, leaders take the role of a coach and help team members find opportunities to grow. On other occasions, they need to be a decision maker on an important matter or sometimes hold space for the rest of the team in the role of a facilitator. Understanding these roles, when to deploy them and how they can impact your team can help you be a more engaging and effective team leader. In this guide, we’ll explore the different leadership…

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