Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Author: Robert Cserti

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…

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…

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…

35 effective leadership activities and games

Good leaders can make or break a team. While more and more people are being asked to step into leadership roles, the path to becoming a good leader is long and not always straightforward. This is where leadership activities come in. Leadership activities are a great way of developing the skills and competencies needed to be an effective leader. It's not easy to learn these skills, especially when so many leaders don't receive effective training or support. In this article, we'll explore the leadership activities you should master in order to lead a high-performing team and become a better leader! Learning the why and how of being a great leader…

35 Brilliant Large Group Games for 20+ people!

If you are running a meeting or group training workshop you probably have your favorite group activities that are easy to run and have proven to be effective in the past. But what about when your group size balloons to 20-40+ people? That's when well-designed large group games come into their own! These activities create space for fun and play in big teams, whatever your environment. In this post, we'll share our favorite large group games alongside tips for running them too! Whenever you design a session, you'll want to consider the number of participants so you can plan activities appropriately. With very large groups, it gets harder to involve…

What are facilitation skills and how to improve them?

Facilitation skills are the abilities you need in order to master working with a group. In essence, facilitation is about being aware of what happens when people get together to achieve a common goal, and directing their focus and attention in ways that serve the group itself. When we work together at our best, we can achieve a lot more than anything we might attempt alone. Working with others is not always easy: teamwork is fraught with risks and pitfalls, but skilled facilitation can help navigate them with confidence. With the right approach, facilitation can be a workplace superpower. Whatever your position, career path, or life story, you probably have…

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47 useful online tools for workshop planning and meeting facilitation

Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. But how do you choose the right ones? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or MS Office toolkit and email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing and delivering your workshop? Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. In this post, we’ll share our favorite online tools you can use to make your job as a facilitator easier. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can…

How to facilitate a Quarterly Planning Process (Detailed Guide)

Setting a coherent strategy for your company is important. And getting everyone on your team to row in the same direction is essential to achieve your goals. However, creating strategy alignment across a company, and within teams is not trivial. At SessionLab, we had our round of struggles with quarterly planning and goal setting as our company was scaling from a founder-driven, few people operations to a more structured and process-driven organization. In this article I will share the insights we learned from designing and facilitating our quarterly goals setting and alignment process. After a couple of quarters of iterations, we’re happy with a format that seems to work and…

How we ran our team retreat online (2022)

We are a fully remote team at SessionLab, since day zero, embracing asynchronous remote collaboration. Periodically, it’s important to align though. Both in a strategic sense, so we altogether row in the same direction. And also to keep up and improve team cohesion. As a distributed team, with entirely flexible working hours, it’s hard to find time and opportunity for moments that build bonds among team members. Therefore, live meetings have always been among the most anticipated events. Our team meeting at the Croatian seaside in 2021 August was a major boost to our team spirit. We tend to do such full-team events twice a year, and prior to summer…

How we ran our company retreat (hybrid!)

At SessionLab, we’ve always been a fully remote company. We love being a globally distributed team who can do our best work wherever we are! But seeing each other at our in-person team retreats have always been an integral part of our culture and are a massive part of building team cohesion. We previously aimed for a full team retreat twice a year. After a fun and productive team meeting in Barcelona in February 2020, we were already anticipating the summer meeting when we would see each other again. Sadly, the global pandemic had other plans. The world turned upside down, including the world of workshops and work retreats, too.…

New Overview Print/PDF options ????️ + Groups in Library

The start of the new year has brought us some fresh energy and we hope that 2021 will allow all of us to have in-person workshops again, besides the remote sessions we have grown used to. Whether you are printing out your workshop agendas on paper or exporting to PDF to share digitally, we have some exciting news for you! We made an early release (Beta) of the totally new print and export experience inspired by your feedback. It has 3 new presets to choose from (+ we moved the old one as well to the new interface) giving you a greater variety of options for how you want to…

How to Run a Virtual End-of-Year Team Event – Real Example

Whether you call it a holiday celebration, Christmas party or year closing event, each year you and your team likely hold a session to bring everyone together and close the year before heading off for the holidays. At SessionLab, we felt it was important to hold a team session to close the year, have fun, reflect, and appreciate everything we had achieved. The goal was to raise spirits before people went away for the holidays, celebrate the year, and build team bonds and experiences that would persist into the New Year and beyond. As a fully remote team, most of our meetings and team building events are virtual by default-…

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