20 impactful workshop ideas for your next event

When should I host a workshop?

While there are a near infinite number of potential triggers and workshop topics, the primary reason you may need to host a workshop will likely fall into one of these two camps:

1. You have a group of people together in one place and someone (maybe you) says “Let’s use this opportunity effectively and run a workshop!”
2. You have a specific, (often challenging) goal that requires people to collaborate.

While the specific circumstances can differ, I find this useful to think about when understanding why you should run a workshop, and what kind of a workshop you should run.

If you have a specific goal, this is easy. Whatever your challenge or task, a well-facilitated workshop that is designed to achieve that goal is a great way to go. In the context of this blog post, you’ll find different types of workshop that each have a goal in mind, whether that’s skills development or problem solving.

Using these sessions as inspiration for your next workshop event will help you move things along swiftly while benefit from the insights of experienced facilitators too.

If you’re running a workshop event that is not in response to a specific goal, this is a little trickier. Maybe you have a three-day company conference and have been tasked with running a workshop one afternoon. What do you do?

In this case, it comes down to thinking about the needs of your participants and the context that brings them together. Workshops are always purposeful, even if that purpose is as simple as having fun as a team and building bonds.

If this is you, you’ll find a heap of workshop ideas that can serve as inspiration below. In addition, it’s worth talking to your team, your managers and event organizers to determine what would best serve the group with the time you have available.

You can read much more about this topic in our post on what is a workshop and why you should run one.

If you’re ready to move towards planning your workshop agenda, check out our guide on how to plan a workshop which also includes a template for a series of client planning meetings.

What are the different types of workshops?

So now we’ve established that workshops are a powerful way to bring a group together and get things done and you’re eager to run one. Next, it might be useful to understand some of the different types of workshop you might run.

Whether you’re organising a session in a workplace environment, at school or as part of a community, each of these workshop activities can be a great way to encourage teamwork and make meaningful progress on your goals.

Before you jump into designing a session, we’d recommend considering this (non-exhaustive) list alongside your goals and the needs of your workshop attendees. By holding all these details together, you can select the right workshop format as the basis for creating an engaging, interactive session.

Whether you’re looking for online workshop ideas or an agenda for an in person event or hybrid workshop, you’ll find something fit for your needs here.

Added bonus, for most of these workshop ideas we’ve also included a ready-to-use, high-quality template for you you can look at for inspiration or even take as a guideline to base your next workshop on! Let’s take a look.

Corporate workshops

In a corporate setting, workshops tend to be used in two primary ways:

1. as an efficient structure for collaboration;
2. as an engaging format for learning and development.

There are many ways to use workshops as a collaborative workplace tool. You might run an ideation workshop to create innovative ideas and solve tough problems facing your company.

Workshops can also be used to set team values, develop company strategy or effectively open or close an important project. What all these use cases have in common is a need for a group to work collaboratively on a common goal. Workshops provide an excellent format for structured work that encourages participation and shared responsible.

For example, a leadership development workshop can help aspiring managers develop the skills they need to lead their teams and build confidence. Similarly, a communication or public speaking workshop can improve how team members interact with each other and with clients, leading to more efficient and harmonious workplace dynamics.

By addressing specific needs and challenges within the organization, corporate workshops can drive significant improvements in performance and morale.

Skills development and educational workshops

While traditional lectures and teaching formats will always have their place, workshops are a powerful tool for learning. Educational workshops are designed to enhance knowledge, skills, and competencies by focusing on the latest research, trends, and best practices in various industries. Examples of educational workshop ideas include college workshops and industry-specific sessions tailored to meet the specific learning needs of the participants.

Educational workshops are particularly effective because they offer a hands-on, interactive learning experience. Participants can engage with the material in a meaningful way, ask questions, and receive feedback from experts and peers.

This approach not only deepens understanding but also helps attendees retain and apply what they’ve learned. Whether it’s a workshop on the latest technological advancements or a session on effective teaching strategies, educational workshops are a powerful tool for continuous learning and growth.

Creative workshops

Remember: all workshops have a goal. Sometimes that goal can be lofty and specific, such as in a strategic planning session or project retrospective. Other times, the goal of workshop events can be to simply create space for fun, memorable experiences with a group.

Creative workshops are interactive sessions where participants get the chance to practice and develop creative skills in a safe and engaging environment.

Examples of creative workshop ideas you might use with a group include art classes, music, and creative writing workshops. These sessions encourage participants to think outside the box, develop new skills, and build confidence in their creative abilities, all while sharing the experience with others.

For event planners, creative workshop ideas can be a great addition to a conference program, networking event or as part of a company retreat. At SessionLab for example, we always try to build in time for collective creativity during our team retreats, whether that’s an art class, pottery making workshop or even cooking together.

In our experience, the right creative workshop can also have profound effects on things like team cohesion, trust and general happiness. Especially as a fully remote team, we’ve found running a virtual workshop with the express goal to have fun and be creative as a group has helped keep our emotional batteries running high.

Corporate workshop ideas

Workshops are one of the most effective ways for a group to get things done. In a corporate environment, workshops can be used to help teams tackle workplace challenges, create innovation, learn new skills or even have memorable, team bonding experiences.

One misconception I’ve seen is that workshops are fluffy by nature, only for exploring creative topics and learning skills, and not for serious work. On the contrary, workshops provide a structured space for collaboration in whatever form is needed by the group.

You might run a leadership development workshop where would-be managers can share experiences, practice their skills and gain confidence as leaders. On the other hand, you might run a workshop to plan your yearly strategy or resolve an emerging problem.

It’s key to remember that workshops are goal and outcome oriented, designed to reach an intended outcome by engaging all participants in the process. If you have a clear goal and bring the right people together in pursuit of that goal, there are few things you cannot achieve in a workshop.

What’s more: workshops produce results quickly. Under the guidance of a facilitator, a corporate workshop can move things forward more swiftly than endless emails or Slack threads.

Here are some impactful ideas for your next corporate workshop:

Leadership development

Great leadership doesn’t happen overnight. The best organizations know that investing in learning and development is a powerful way to equip new and existing managers with the skills they need to lead their teams well.

Leadership development workshops often comprise a combination of training scenarios, skills development and peer support, all designed to engage new leaders and improve their abilities.(Read more on this in our guide on how to run a leadership workshop.)

While it’s possible to teach many of these skills asynchronously, the experiential format of a workshop can help spread best practices, improve learning potential and help new leaders learn from one another as they grow. Interactive workshop activities can play a crucial role in making these sessions more engaging and effective for leadership development.

The workshop format also allows participants to practice leadership skills and techniques under the guidance of an experienced facilitator. Yes, a role-playing scenario might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in the right format, it can help new leaders feel more confident in leading and managing their team.

Check out the leadership development workshop template to see what such a workshop looks like in practice.

You might also find our collection of leadership training activities helpful for building out a learning and development program.

Team building

Team building can come in many different forms. Happy hours, escape rooms and fun games can all strengthen relationships in your team, but you can go further.

Team building workshops offer a dedicated space for collaboration that helps teams practice and demonstrate skills that will also help in their day-to-day work. These can come in the form of group problem-solving games, collaborative challenges or even exercises designed to expressly deepen connections and help people get to know each other more.

In our experience, these kinds of workshops can help improve communication, create memorable shared experiences and build bonds.

Explore our team development day workshop template to see how you might effectively structure such a team workshop.

Have limited time but want to add team building elements into your session? Our collection of team building activities come in all shapes and sizes so you can easily plug them into an existing agenda!

Design sprint 

When you have a tough problem without a clear solution, a design sprint is one of the best ways to approach the issue. First developed at Google, the design sprint is a structured approach for teams to explore a problem and ideate, refine, prototype and test solutions.

One of the major strengths of a facilitated workshop is structure. When collaborating on tough challenges with others, it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole or spend time inefficiently. Workshop formats like the design sprint have been tested and refined by facilitators for years. By using the benefit of all that experience, you’ll instead be able to focus on resolving challenges and creating innovation.

Check out the 4-day Design Sprint 2.0 template by AJ&Smart for a ready-to-use method for solving tough problems. Want to focus on fresh ideas and brainstorming? The one-hour brain sprint template offers a self contained brainstorming workshop that is ideally suited to a short workshop event.

Diversity and inclusion workshop

Workshops led with the guidance of an expert facilitator can be one of the most powerful ways to explore emotionally charged and complex concerns. Promoting awareness and action on diversity and inclusion can help create an equitable and inclusive work environment, but it’s not enough to just update company policies and ask folks to read up.

Workshop events can be used to create a safe forum for discussion, help participants feel seen and heard and to give practical examples to the group. By dedicating time and space to DEI, you can ensure that it’s given full attention by participants and ensure complete understanding too. 

When running a diversity and inclusion workshop, we’d recommend that you bring in an external facilitator to help. The expertise of a skilled facilitator with dozens of DEI workshops under their belt can’t be underestimated. Furthermore, the role of a facilitator as an unbiased third party can really help create the psychological safety needed for such a topic. 

Project opening and closing

So your team is starting a big new project. Isn’t the best bet just to email all stakeholders and say you’re getting started? Nope. A workshop is an ideal forum for kicking off complex projects, engaging all stakeholders and surfacing potential issues before they arise. 

A project kickoff is designed to engage all participants in the planning process and ensure that work will be smooth once you get started. It’s a great place for everyone involved to air concerns, ask questions and get aligned. You’ll often end with a list of follow-up actions, check-in dates and clear scope for the project.

Closing a project with a dedicated workshop is also important. A retrospective workshop can ensure key learnings are shared, celebrations are held and that the project is symbolically closed. 

Kickoff and project retrospectives are two formats that especially benefit from meta analysis. Take the time to reflect on the process itself and improve how you run these sessions in order to make future workshops even more effective.

Read more in this guide for running project kickoffs or try using this kickoff workshop template as the basis for your next agenda. 

Running a retrospective? This retrospective workshop template provides a simple and effective structure to aid reflection and help team members work on concrete steps for improvement.

Strategy planning workshop

Working on company strategy is rarely easy. Companies have many moving parts, competing priorities and organizational needs. The process of exploring, planning and implementing a strategy is often best served by the dedicated space of a workshop. 

A strategic planning workshop typically involves a process of exploring possible strategic directions and tasks, discussing them in line with overall goals and then formulating a plan for implementation.

Getting your best minds in one room and following a structure such as this EOS strategy planning workshop can help ensure decisions are made effectively and that all stakeholders are able to contribute effectively. 

Templatizing your process is a great way to simplify and improve how your strategy is created and rolled out. At SessionLab, we run a quarterly strategy planning process that benefits from reusing a recurring agenda and a Miro board that’s been refined over many strategy planning sessions.

Learn more about how we approach this process at SessionLab with this guide to running a strategic planning workshop.

Company values workshop

Your organization’s values determine everything from cultural norms inside your company to your direction and focus. It’s not uncommon for companies to develop internal friction if these values aren’t defined or people aren’t aligned on how best to live and practice them. 

A company values workshop is designed to either define or refine a company’s core values. Your team will explore questions like: What does the company stand for? What is most important to us? How do we want to treat one another and work together? How are our shared values reflected in our goals and company mission? 

By dedicating time and space to exploring these as a team, you can help create alignment, improve team cohesion and create a set of core values you’re proud to stand beside. 

Want an example? Explore your team values and define how you want to work together in this team canvas workshop template.

Stress management and mindfulness workshop

Mindfulness in the workplace needs more than lip service in order to be effective. While wellness budgets and no-meetings Tuesdays can help, you can have a more profound and lasting effect on employee stress levels by holding workshops designed to help solve root causes and teach valuable techniques to your team.

Stress management workshops and sessions dedicated to mindfulness can come in many forms. You might teach time management techniques and provide resources for reducing stress and achieving a better work-life balance. Alternatively, you might host a problem solving workshop on the topic of workplace stress and discuss the various obstacles and opportunities for tackling the issue.

Remember that workshops are emergent by nature: even bringing people together to talk about the subject can have transformative effects on how your team approaches stress and self care.

Using a group discussion format like World Cafe to invite folks to self-organize and discuss what’s most important on the topic of stress and mindfulness can help whatever needs to surface come to the fore.

Training workshops

When you need to teach your employees important new skills, competencies or train them in the use of technical equipment, you’ll likely need to run a training session or distribute learning materials. While some concepts can be taught with a single email or seminar, important topics can benefit from the experiential learning environment of a training workshop. 

While classic training may be more passive in nature, training workshops are designed to be interactive and practical. Participants will be expected to get involved, share their experiences with other participants and learn by doing. Training sessions like these are especially effective when teaching softer skills or when it’s beneficial to receive instant feedback from the trainer or facilitator. 

You’ll find more on this in our guide to running a training session and in our various skills development workshops below. 

You might also find this training workshop template – heavily informed by Kolb’s learning cycle – useful when it comes to structuring your next training event.

Skill development and educational workshop ideas

The distinction between a training session and a workshop can feel quite narrow, especially in the hands of an experienced facilitator or trainer. While training sessions may have a pass/fail criteria for participants learning a new skill, skills development workshops are often softer in approach.

For example, if you need your participants to master a piece of highly precise technical equipment, that’s a training session. If you want your participants to practice various ways of giving and receiving feedback in order to improve their interpersonal skills at work, that would work great as an engaging workshop.

In this section, we’ll share some ideas for workshops where learning and skills development is the primary goal. These are extremely useful for developing individual competencies or helping teams work together more effectively moment to moment. Let’s take a peek.

Conflict Resolution

Conflict and friction can occur whenever passionate people work together. In our experience, conflict is often a sign that something is important and needs extra attention. What’s important is that people are able to express a difference of opinion without it escalating into an unproductive or damaging discussion. As such, it’s important that companies equip their teams with the skills to manage and resolve conflicts effectively.

Developing conflict resolution skills in a workshop can look like a combination of case study analyses, role-playing activities and de-escalation techniques. It can also be incredibly effective to work on building team trust or giving participants tools like active listening and self management techniques that can help ensure discussions are more inclusive and productive in the first place. 

Read more in our collection of conflict resolution techniques, which contains exercises designed to teach conflict management skills alongside frameworks for discussing and deescalating conflict.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace

Emotional intelligence is one of those so-called soft skills that is incredibly important to the functioning of any organization. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and understand the feelings of yourself and others and respond effectively. When folks are emotionally intelligent, communication is good, people feel seen and heard and collaboration is a joy. Without it, communication breakdowns occur, people feel misunderstood and it can be hard to get anything done.

Emotional intelligence can be broken down into distinct skillsets and techniques such as self awareness, self management, empathy, group dynamics and more. This self awareness workshop template is an effective session for exploring and strengthening this skillset with practical techniques. 

Want more? See this guide to emotional intelligence activities for more practical techniques and workshop ideas you can bring to virtual workshops and in-person sessions alike.

Decision-making

The ability to quickly make effective decisions is an important skill to master. In truth, making good decisions often comes from a composite of many different skills working together and the application of decision making models. Good decision makers need to leverage everything from critical thinking, root cause analyses and interpersonal skills when making decisions.

Running a workshop on improving decision making skills can have a profound impact on how your team makes decisions both micro and macro. Making faster, more informed decisions about how to spend your day and what to prioritize can often be as valuable as how to make a decision on company direction, for example. Such a workshop would likely be a mix of decision making exercises, advice on how to make good decisions and moments for participants to discuss and practice as a group. 

Explore possible exercises and decision making workshop ideas with our collection of decision making techniques. 

Running a workshop where you want to actually make an important decision as a group? This is an excellent idea!

Read more in our guide on how to run a group decision making process. You’ll find heaps of tips and structures that will help your group discuss and finalize even the most complex decisions.

The decision making workshop template is also an excellent example of how you might structure such a process.  

Effective communication skills

How we communicate and share information can have a profound effect on our relationships and the work we get done. Whether it’s for customer facing teams or for improving internal processes, an effective communication workshop can be a powerful way to solve issues and improve efficiency in your organization. 

An effective communication workshop should include a combination of activities designed to improve self awareness and clarity, as well as tools for giving productive feedback and practicing active listening. It’s common for workshop participants to also spend time exploring why misunderstandings and miscommunications might occur and discussing how things might be done differently in the future.

This collection of communication games and techniques is a great starting point for running a communication workshop with your team.

Simply adding an active listening exercise or feedback technique like What I Need From You to a team building activity is a great way of developing this skillset and improving team collaboration in your group. 

Storytelling workshop

Humans love stories. Learning how to tell great stories is helpful to everyone from marketers and customer support staff, all the way through to leaders and folks delivering presentations and pitching to clients. 

Storytelling workshops will typically combine group discussions, some expert theory and plenty of opportunity to practice telling our own stories. Personally, I find that starting with examples of stories that have stayed with us is a great leaping-off point that helps keep attendees engaged before leaping into deeper workshop content.

A storytelling workshop typically includes techniques for grabbing the attention of an audience, storytelling devices that help create a compelling narrative and some practice on how to use visual elements, sound and memetic tools to help your stories stick. 

For a taste, you might find this story building activity useful when kickstarting your workshop. Alternatively, this creative writing exercise encouraging folks to write from the perspective of an alien is a good example of how creative explorations can inform how we tell stories.

Facilitation skills

Facilitation is a vital workplace skill that can improve how we hold space and collaborate. Key facilitation skills like process design, group management and consensus-building aren’t just for professional facilitators. Anyone who runs meetings, workshops or collaborates can benefit from these skills, especially if they’re also in a leadership role. 

Running a workshop on how to facilitate effectively can get a bit meta, but it can be an invaluable sandbox for learning how to lead better meetings, training sessions and workshops. It can help folks collaborate better internally and also make client-facing meetings run more smoothly and effectively.

Explore this facilitation skills workshop template to start imparting these valuable skills and begin building a culture of facilitation in your organization.

Effective feedback

The way we give and receive feedback can have a profound impact on our personal and working lives. It’s quite common for people to be afraid of feedback and to avoid giving or receiving feedback altogether. The result can be missed growth opportunities, recurring mistakes and an inability to express how something has made us feel. 

Feedback workshops can help participants understand how important feedback is to personal growth and development while also developing techniques to help make the process easy and productive. 

This art of effective feedback workshop is a simple template that will help teams explore the concept and develop practical feedback techniques they can put into practice immediately.  

Looking for a self-contained activity you can add to your next retreat or team workshop? Check this collection of feedback activities for practical, effective exercises your team can use in a pinch.

Creative thinking and innovation workshops

Creative thinking is a powerful skill to encourage in both our personal and professional lives. In a corporate setting, creativity can be important to everyone from CEO to frontline support. It can help everyone see opportunities for innovation and give them the tools to solve problems.

When people tell me they’re not creative, I’ve often found that they mean “I can’t paint or draw” or “I’m worried about being judged for being creative.” Workshops designed to awaken latent creativity or help people realize how to apply their creative impulses without fear of judgment can be transformative.

Whether it’s in the form of brainstorming activities or creative workshops, remember that creativity is often generative, joyful and gratifying for those involved. That’s even before you begin to think about the impact of those innovative solutions to your business. Take the time to encourage employees to think innovatively and solve problems creatively and you’ll see results both micro and macro.

Check out this collection of creative thinking activities for inspiration that can enliven any session.

Looking for a deeper session? This ideation workshop template provides an effective framework for creating new ideas and creative solutions.

Workshop ideas for business events

Workshops can add immense value to business events, whether you’re running a conference or networking session. Some of my most engaging and memorable experiences at these kinds of events have been when I’ve joined a workshop with people I’ve just met and created something as a group.

Remember that workshops can be effective in many different formats. Putting virtual participants in an online workshop where they get to do deeper work and connect more meaningfully can be more impactful than any number of icebreaker activities.

As with all of the session formats here, it’s important for the event organizer to consider the needs and expectations of the target audience when choosing a topic. If in doubt, ask attendees what they want as part of the event planning process and maybe even invite them to lead a session.

Open Space Technology 

When you bring large groups of people together in a shared goal or area of interest, something special happens. Topics emerge, ideas are shared and its possible to create lots of momentum for change. It’s also possible that the session descends into chaos. So how do you create space for emergence while also maintaining enough structure to ensure action and outcomes?

Open Space Technology was originally created by Harrison Owen and perfected in decades of collaborative work by the Open Space Technology world-wide community. It is an event format when participants of a session co-create an agenda together. To begin, a general topic or theme is decided upon for the open space. Next, participants are invited to propose topics for discussion and host breakout groups who will come together to discuss and work on that topic.

Sessions will then be run in parallel, with a mix of people hosting, contributing and coming and going freely from different sessions. Open space is designed to be emergent, though it has enough structure to allow for sessions to be organized, opened and closed with ease. 

If you have a group of people who all care about a certain topic or who have a giant problem to solve and you’re struggling to know what to focus on, Open Space is a great workshop idea. What emerges organically from a group of passionate people united in purpose is exactly what needs to come up, and it encourages folks to take responsibility, be creative and collaborate in an incredibly powerful way.  

Check out the Open Space Technology template to kickstart your event planning process and create a structured yet dynamic event.

Hackathon

Hackathons can be an extremely powerful way to create momentum and explore tasks in a safe, self-contained way that makes it easy to experiment. At business events, an impromptu or arranged hackathon can mobilize folks with a shared goal and deliver concrete outputs quickly. 

As with any other creative session, hackathons benefit from a careful balance of structure and free space to create innovative ideas. Hackathons typically have a focus area, topic or problem space and a strict timeframe in which teams work together to create a solution or innovation in that space.

Hackathons can be a wonderful addition to an event as they are often multi-disciplinary in nature, inviting participants with different skillsets to work together to create something in a short timeframe. I’d only urge that you take the time to add some structure to proceedings so that things can run smoothly can avoid potential descending into chaos!

Mastermind group 

Sometimes, the best way to learn is from our peers. A mastermind is where a group of skilled and like-minded people come together on a recurring basis for peer coaching and problem solving.

Masterminds work best with a consistent group that allows for accountability and vulnerability, though I’ve seen them create impact even when run as one-off sessions.

I once attended a cybersecurity conference when a mastermind format emerged organically in response to various professionals experiencing similar problems. We ran out first session on the spot and then followed up with online sessions as a group over the next few months. It was a great container for us all to share experiences and help one another solve tough problems. 

It’s also worth noting that Masterminds greatly benefit when there are people with significant experience taking part. Not everyone needs to be an expert, but if you have five people who are all newbies, it can be harder for any advice to be backed up by concrete learnings and practical experience. 

To experience the benefits of the peer-coaching Mastermind experience in a short timespan, you might want to try a Liberating Structure activity called Troika Consulting. This works by putting participants in small huddles of three people, in which one presents their current issue or challenge and the other two act as consultants. You’ll be surprised how much insight can emerge in the span of fifteen minutes!

What are the key characteristics of workshops?

Workshops come in many shapes and sizes and will differ in content and design based on the goal of the session. That said, workshops tend of feature some defining characteristics that collectively ensure that the session will be successful and engaging.

If you’re just getting started or need help understanding how a workshop is different than a meeting or a typical training session, this list will help make the distinction clear while also hopefully selling you on the prospect of running a workshop!

Workshops are an interactive environment

In comparison to lectures and webinars, workshops are interactive by nature. Workshops typically include a mix of practical exercises, group discussions, and real-time problem-solving where everyone is encouraged to participate and learn experientially.

The result is a session that emphazies full engagement and makes the process of working together a joy, rather than a dull, passive experience.

You’ll find a workshop format using interactive elements also encourages ownership and action: ensuring things actually get done after the session. If you find your meetings and events rarely result in decisive action and lack momentum, consider trying an interactive workshop instead!

Workshops have a clear goal and purpose

Workshops should always have a clear goal, such as developing skills, exploring a problem or building connections between team members. This purpose guides everything from the structure of the agenda to specific exercises and outcomes.

When running a workshop, it’s helpful to remember that a clear goal doesn’t always mean concrete, deliverable output.

In soft skills training sessions for example, the goal may be for participants to share previous experiences and practice new techniques as a team. There may not be a test at the end to give a pass/fail, but the goal of improving interpersonal dynamics has still been pursued.

On the other hand, the goal of a strategic planning workshop may include a completed strategy document, ready for the next steps of discovery or implementation.

All these goals are important and facilitators and event organizers should always measure whether they achieved the goal. Just remember that workshops are often very much worth running, even if the output isn’t a physical document: who doesn’t want to improve team cohesion or employee happiness?

Workshops are structured and time-bound

Workshops typically run for a specific amount of time, anything from an hour to multiple sessions over many days. To achieve the goals of the workshop in the allocated timeframe, the facilitator will create structure in the form of an agenda while also time-boxing and guiding the group through activities effectively.

Ever had issues with brainstorming going on for so long that you never get around to make a decision? Workshops can help with that.

Whether its a virtual or in-person workshop, the time-bound format is especially effective for helping attendees focus and leave other concerns at the door. When everyone in the room is gathered for a specific purpose for a specific amount of time, you’ll be surprised by what you can achieve together.

Workshops are facilitated

Workshops typically have a facilitator onboard to help guide the flow of the session, orient the group and provide structure. Teams might bring in an expert facilitator who also happens to be a subject matter expert or a manager or team leader might also take on the facilitator role. In addition to designing the session, the facilitator will also help manage group dynamics, run activities and report back.

The value add of a facilitator cannot be underestimated. Not only are they well positioned to encourage participation and ownership, but they’ll also ensure that the goal of the session is always in mind, whatever dynamically happens during the workshop.

Unsure about what else a facilitator actually does? Find a practical definition of facilitator and explore what they can bring to your session in this guide.

Workshops are dynamic

While workshops always have a concrete goal in mind, the way the best workshops achieve that goal is often dynamic and emergent in nature.

For example, let’s say you’re running a workshop to teach participants conflict resolution skills. The facilitator will have prepared an agenda in advance, but what happens if world events bring a unique energy into the room and some of the activities no longer seem fit for purpose?

Great facilitators will adjust the flow of the workshop in the moment to speak to the needs of the group and facilitate the best route towards the original goal. It takes practice, trust and a strong design foundation, but when it happens, the results can be especially impactful.

What’s next?

A great workshop is probably the best format for bringing people together to get things done. With effective design, good facilitation and the right workshop format, you can encourage participants to take part and create impact as a group. Truly, an engaging workshop can create memorable experiences that leave an indelible and lasting impression on all in attendance. So what are you waiting for?

I hope this list of interactive workshop ideas gives you some inspiration for running your next session and helps get the creative juices flowing!

For next steps, our post on how to plan and organize a workshop offers a practical, step-by-step process that can help you make your ideas a reality.

Check out the accompanying workshop planning template in SessionLab to kickstart your process with an easy to follow agenda that will help you design your next workshop too!

Have any questions or suggestions for other workshop ideas for keeping participants engaged? Get in touch in the comments below!

James Smart Head of Content

James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.