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Making the transition from in-person to hybrid workshops can be challenging for facilitators. With a little bit of preparation and understanding, your next workshop can engage both remote and onsite participants equally. As an Experience Design Manager at Prudential, I have conducted dozens of workshops both in person, remote, and hybrid. In this article, we’ll explore strategies I’ve tested that meet the needs of stakeholders and ultimately enhance our customer experiences. We’ll discuss how to ensure all participants are heard, tips for designing engaging activities, and ways to effectively manage workshop time.

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But first. Why should you run a workshop?

Workshops provide a space and opportunity for designers to bring together key stakeholders from various areas of expertise to brainstorm solutions, refine ideas, and develop innovative strategies together.

By providing an opportunity for collective problem-solving using the right tools, design thinking workshops empower organizations to come up with unique ideas that can be implemented quickly and efficiently. These sessions provide valuable insights into customer needs which can lead to improved user experiences.

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1. Getting Started

Setting up the workshop correctly is almost as important as the workshop itself. There is no one size fits all template that will solve every business problem. It’s very important to customize your sessions to the unique opportunity you are looking to focus on.

To get started with customizing your workshop, ask yourself or your stakeholders the following questions before creating into the agenda:

The Lofty:

• Do we have a clear understanding of the problem we are looking to solve?
• Is there a mission or business opportunity statement? Who will provide this?
• Do we know who our customer is and what journey we intend to focus on?
• Are our expectations aligned on the outcome, scope, and scale of the workshop?

The Logistical:

• Who do we need in the “room” to ensure that we have diverse perspectives and decision-making power? (Keeping your workshops small (4–7 participants) will ensure that everyone is able to contribute equally, whether they are online or in front of you.)
• Are these participants available for in-person, remote or hybrid?
• How much time should we dedicate to solving this problem?
• What tools do we have at our disposal?

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2. Creating an Agenda & Choosing Engaging Activities

Once you can confidently answer these questions, it’s time to set up the structure of your workshop. An agenda should include tasks that are meant to be tackled during the workshop, such as ideation sessions and brainstorming activities, as well as time for breaks and reflection.

(My rule of thumb is a 10-minute break for every 50 minutes of working. )

The key to engaging participants during design workshops is choosing activities that encourage collaboration and structured dialogue among team members.

Here are a few examples of activities I have used in the past:

• Storyboarding: Walk participants through the customer’s journey in a story format to plot pain points and lead the workshop through the customer’s perspective.
• How Might We: A classic. Reframing pain points into opportunities. (Example: Pain Point — People don’t care about workshops. HMW: How might we get people excited to come to workshops?)
• Ideating: Take your HMWs and ideate potential solutions using stickies.
• Affinity Mapping: Theming ideas very quickly points the group in a direction and breaks down several conversations into distinct groupings. This can be done throughout the session to keep the group in scope.
• Sketching/ Visualizing: Participants take some quiet time to sketch out top voted ideas. They should be self-explanatory, pen & paper and can include words/boxes/user flows.

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3. Preparing the workspace

Our team uses Miro as our primary tool for white-boarding for either remote or in person. Online white-boarding tools are helpful for keeping track of conversations after the workshop has ended and they allow participants to go back to revisit the discussion at any time. Keeping the momentum of the workshop is crucial to delivering outcomes after the session has ended.

Here are some ways to spruce up your boards:

• Start with instructions & a warm up. Make sure users know how to use Miro! Provide instructions for first time users, or even better — set up a pre-session meeting to make sure all have access. I use sticky notes and voting dots. Make sure the participants can write stickies & move dots before you have them missing out on conversations and not providing their voice.
• Provide context. Every single person should know exactly why they are there, what the goals of the workshop are, and what is in scope. Sometimes this means I provide pre-reading decks or links/visuals on the board itself.
• Create a Parking Lot. The parking lot is used to keep participants on track and within the scope of the workshop. It allows a space for out-of-scope ideas to be parked. It’s important to note that the parking lot is valuable and not disregarded. I remind my participants that parking lot ideas are reviewed, prioritized, and used to determine if we need another workshop.
• Heatmap voting. During the workshop, instead of going into long discussions, participants use red dots to signify agreement on ideas that they want the team to pursue. In some situations, I’ve used a star to signify a decider vote when a tiebreaker is needed.

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4. Establishing Ground Rules & Setting Expectations

Ground rules are essential when it comes to facilitating productive hybrid workshops. These ground rules help establish boundaries around behavior and communication between participants so that everyone feels heard and respected. Setting these expectations early on helps ensure that everyone is on the same page throughout the duration of the workshop.

Here are some examples of the guidelines I set for my participants:

⏱️ Watch the timer: Our schedule is tight! The facilitator will use a timer for every step. Try to end the discussion before the timer goes off.

📝 More is better than perfect: This is just a rough draft. We will make mistakes and learn fast. Don’t limit your ideas, even if you think they are not currently possible within our systems.

🗣️ Think big, think customer: Try to take yourself outside of your current role on your team. Think about our persona and their needs, you are not the customer.

🖥️ Virtual workshops are hard, have fun: Miro might not work well for you. Sometimes technology fails. Leverage the teams chat and speak up for help. We can help each other as a group, and hopefully have some fun!

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5. During & after the workshop

These workshops usually move FAST! With the bulk of the work occurring during the preparation stage, it’s important to take a breath on the day of your workshop and have fun! Once the workshop has concluded, thank the participants for dedicating their time and sharing their ideas. When you wrap up your session, make sure that participants understand what actions they need to take next for their efforts during the workshop to translate into tangible results. Sending a follow up email can keep the momentum going after the session concludes.

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Conclusion

Facilitating successful design workshops can seem daunting but with some careful preparation it doesn’t have to be! By taking time beforehand to create an agenda with clear objectives, establishing ground rules for behavior, setting expectations for participation and ensuring your technology is set up, your design workshops will be productive and effective!

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