Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Author: James Smart - page 2

How to build a strong team culture in eight steps

Building a team culture that helps everyone in your organization feel valued and empowered to do their best work should be a priority for every organization. Without a healthy company culture, you can see toxic behavior, reduced productivity, and even lose members of the team! But how can you and your team co-create an organizational culture you can be proud of and that makes your team want to come into work every day? In this article, we’ll explore why team culture is important and discuss eight ways you can start to improve your culture today. Let's dig in! What is team culture? Team culture is a collection of values, behaviors,…

25 engaging ice breakers for virtual meetings (that won’t bore your team!)

Virtual ice breakers can be an effective method of kicking off a project, onboarding a new team member or enlivening your team meetings. Choose the right method and you can get your meeting off to an energizing start that encourages participation and builds connections. Get it wrong and risk being met with groaning team members or indifference. In this post, we'll share some proven virtual icebreaker games used by real facilitators and help you find the right method for your virtual team. Whether you need a short activity to kick off a conference call or to help onboard new team members without making things awkward, we have you covered! When teams…

How to write a meeting agenda (and run better meetings!)

Learning how to write a meeting agenda that sets the stage for an effective and engaging gathering is an important leadership skill. Not only will it help you be organized and on time, but it will also help you and your team make the most of your time together. In this guide, we’ll explore what makes a meeting productive and guide you through the process of designing a great meeting agenda. You'll also learn practical tips you can use to improve your next meeting and get every team member engaged and involved. Ready to leave behind boring, unproductive meetings? Let's dive in! Going into a meeting without a purpose or…

33 virtual team building games (free and easy to use!)

Being remotely distributed doesn’t mean your team should be disconnected. It often falls to a facilitator or team leader to help virtual teams stay aligned and connected. Virtual team building games and online activities you can play on Zoom are a great place to start! In this list of completely free online team building games, you can engage and excite your team with ease! We've picked our favourite team building games you can run online without a need for complex set-up or buying additional software. Creating and nurturing high-performing teams in an online environment can be challenging. Not all team activities are suitable for virtual meetings and creating engaging activities…

A complete guide to co-facilitation

One facilitator can make a workshop great. Bringing a co-facilitator can lead to even better engagement, providing participants and facilitators with additional space and focus to reach their desired outcomes.But how can you make co-facilitation a valuable and effective process that justifies the additional cost? How can you be a better co-facilitator? In this guide, we’ll explore the different styles of co-facilitation, how to work with a co-facilitator effectively, and how to pitch co-facilitation to clients too! Workshops, events and training sessions are often complex to design and exhausting to run. Facilitation is a workplace super skill, and while a single facilitator can make all the difference, sometimes they need…

Stay on time while running your sessions with Time Tracker

However well you’ve planned your workshop, all facilitators know that plans can change in the moment. Activities overrun. Great topics emerge and you have to choose what to cut. All while trying to stay on schedule and finish on time. There’s a lot for facilitators to keep track of! We heard time and time again that facilitators like you wanted a simple way to stay on time while delivering their workshops. Now, you can use SessionLab to keep track of time and make changes when running your sessions! With Time Tracker, you can start tracking time in your sessions with a single click. See exactly where you are in your…

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A guide to virtual facilitation (with tips for being a great virtual facilitator!)

In a world of remote working and online meetings, there has never been a greater need for effective virtual facilitation. Studies show that remote workers are happier and more productive than their office working counterparts and the benefits for companies moving to distributed workforces are great too. But what does it take to run effective online gatherings and be a great virtual facilitator? Learn how you can create engaging sessions that deliver results and connection, wherever your team is located in this guide to virtual facilitation! As teams and organizations have transitioned to working online, the need for well-designed and effectively facilitated remote sessions has risen. Unstructured or poorly run…

How to have a more productive team meeting (that staff and managers will love)

The team meeting. A necessary evil, an exercise in wasting time, or your organization’s secret weapon? At it’s best, a team meeting is a way to ensure your staff and management teams are aligned, that no obstacles stand in the way of company progress, and to create an open forum for dialogue and discussion. At their worst, team meetings can frustrate and cause more problems than they solve with many employees facing meeting overload. Can you afford to have bad meetings that could lose clients or cause friction with internal stakeholders when there is a solution? As organizations develop more dynamic ways to communicate, the tried and tested team meeting…

35 problem-solving techniques and methods for solving complex problems

All teams and organizations encounter challenges as they grow. There are problems that might occur for teams when it comes to miscommunication or resolving business-critical issues. You may face challenges around growth, design, user engagement, and even team culture and happiness. In short, problem-solving techniques should be part of every team's skillset. Problem-solving methods are primarily designed to help a group or team through a process of first identifying problems and challenges, ideating possible solutions, and then evaluating the most suitable. Finding effective solutions to complex problems isn’t easy, but by using the right process and techniques, you can help your team be more efficient in the process. So how…

How to improve the learning experience with workshop transitions

Most learning experiences guide participants through different blocks of content to help achieve the desired outcome. But how can you ensure that no one gets lost along the way? Workshop transitions are a method of seamlessly and purposefully moving between content blocks and engaging learners, but how do they work? For this post, we talked to Anja Svetina Nabergoj - Lecturer at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University - about creating a more effective and engaging learning process by using purposeful transitions between workshop exercises. You'll learn what workshop transitions are and how to use them in your designs too! All workshops and courses are an opportunity for…

Asking better questions: an interview with Michael Ambjorn and Martin Gilbraith

Good facilitation can so often come down to asking the right questions at the right time. Great questions and strong communication are part of what enables a group to truly explore a problem, go deeper, and make progress. By asking the right questions and empowering others to do the same, you can help a group find the right answers. But how can we create an environment where it is safe to ask tough questions? How do we know the questions we're asking are the right ones? What are some of the methods and approaches we can use as facilitators to create a better culture of communication? To celebrate the launch…

How to have a productive kickoff meeting (and empower your team!)

Have you ever been a part of a group project that went nowhere or was badly organized to the point of chaos? Perhaps no one knew who was accountable to what, everyone had a different idea of the goals or the final results were poor. So, what went wrong? When it comes to empowering your team to do great work and successfully complete projects, one of the most important things you can do is hold a kickoff meeting. With a comprehensive project kickoff, you can position your team for success, create alignment and structure, and build resiliency to potential issues. By creating clarity, excitement and preparedness in this short, focused…

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