Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Author: Robert Cserti

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…

30 Brilliant Large Group Games and Workshop Activities

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…

31 effective leadership activities for developing great leaders!

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. 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 alongside practical techniques and frameworks is one…

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

We all know how important personal interaction and tight bonds are in our lives. As much as this is true in family and friends circles, it is also crucial at work. Personal interaction is the foundation on which happiness and successful results are built and taking the time to use get to know each other games or ice breakers can be invaluable for any business or team. 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 fulfillment and their relationships with colleagues. Since you can end up spending more time…

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.…

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Free online tools for workshops and meetings

34 useful free online tools for workshop planning and meeting facilitation

Are you facilitating workshops, meetings, or training sessions regularly? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or the MS Office toolkit combined with email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing your workshop preparations and delivery? Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to prepare for meeting facilitation and to conduct workshops. The good thing is that you don’t have to pay a fortune to have the use of technology that helps you make your job easier as a facilitator. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can…

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-…

Better mobile experience and many other exciting improvements

SessionLab has just gotten even better with a range of cool new features in the past weeks. Here we are to recap for you the fresh improvements. Workshop planning on mobile devices Up until recently SessionLab’s workshop planner tool lacked a mobile-friendly version. We know a few determined people who kept using it on mobile devices (ourselves included), but it was far from a decent experience. Now the struggle is over, meet the new mobile version of SessionLab: As a first step, we decided to focus on making the web application mobile friendly, so what you get are not dedicated iOS and Android apps, but a version that works well…

Free online resources for Workshop Activities – cover image

Top 10 Free Online Resources for Workshop Activities (2020)

Meetings and workshops are a significant part of work for most of us. 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 activities for your session, the ones that will fit perfectly with your objectives, group size, profile of participants, and available time. You may already have some favourite exercises for different types…

20 Best Online Tools for Design Thinking

Have you heard of Design Thinking? Chances are you have. It is one of the hottest buzzwords of today, easily found in articles and in the news. The education and business fields are going crazy over it, books are written about it, and service designers, creative agencies, career coaches, trainers and facilitators are using it. Perhaps you’re already applying it in your work or everyday life, too? Since its debut in 1969 when Simon Herbert introduced the model in the Science of the Artificial, Design Thinking has revolutionized business models, education systems, processes of innovation, product and service design and human mindsets. One of the reasons for its popularity is…

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