Library of facilitation techniques

Set the expectations for behavior and conduct you have for participants at the beginning of your online meeting with the Online Meeting Etiquette checklist.

Different teams receive envelopes labeled with different types of disruptive participants. Participants brainstorm guidelines for handling disruptive behaviours, record the guidelines on a card, and place the card inside the envelope. 

Teams rotate the envelopes and generate guideline cards for handling other types of disruptive participants. During the evaluation round, team members review the guideline cards generated by other teams and identify the top five suggestions.

A learning and presentation technique for sharing ideas

Using the Pomodoro technique, this is an exercise to prepare your day by breaking it down into digestible chunks. Say goodbye to procrastination!

Most prioritization and polling processes require participants to either be in the same room (e.g. dot voting) or on the same whiteboard if online. Here is your cheat sheet on how to adapt those to hybrid environments! Tech tasks

Collect all available options on a virtual whiteboard

Number the options

Create a poll on a tool that is easy to use from phones (e.g. Mentimeter) and share the link

The purpose of this exercise is for a group to discuss, define, and come to agreement around key principles of effective feedback. Participants discuss examples of effective and ineffective feedback in pairs, then work together to define “effective feedback.” Then, as a group, they create a list of principles that they will aim to work by.

Individual reflection helps to pick apart complex experiences so that the successes of the experience can be repeated and the failures can be avoided in the future. The format is flexible, taking you through key stages of the reflection process, and ending with key action points.

Roses, buds, and thorns is a quick and simple team exercise that can be performed at the start of a group meeting. The idea is to evaluate a project, team task, or even your day by having each team member come up with a Rose (positive highlight), Thorn (struggle or challenge), and Bud (opportunity for improvement). The goal of this activity is to open up discussion among team members and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of others. This can allow you to put measures in place to do more of what's going well, and fix what needs fixing. As well, this activity inspires creativity and debate within teams. Discussing Buds can encourage new, creative ideas to come to the fore. Finally, the activity allows you to gain insight from all members of the team as communication and honesty are important for every group!

This fun activity allows participants to follow instructions on a MURAL whiteboard to perform a variety of activities and eventually share their name and location. You can use this as a short ice-breaker or energiser (remove some of the activities) or as either pre-work or an opening activity to make sure that everyone knows how to use MURAL before an online session begins.

A MURAL template is included for you to use and modify as you wish (at the bottom of this method).

from "The Moth" Game of Storytelling. Connection, sharing, listening to others.

Encourage creative thinking, expressive drawing and teamwork with this simple but effective energiser activity.