Greetings from Barcelona.☀️
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest, your weekly round-up of tips and insights to help you design and lead exceptional virtual sessions that your group members will love.❤️
✋Hands up if you’ve ever faced this facilitation dilemma:
Your session is scheduled to start at 5:00 pm. But when you open the Zoom room, you see that only half of the group is there.
Here’s your dilemma:
Do you start on time? Or do you wait a few minutes longer for the other half to join and then start?
I used to wait for a few minutes.
I thought, “What if people miss out? How are they going to catch up? They are going to feel left out.” And I made everyone wait.
I realized that waiting for the latecomers generates a lot of frustration.
I was wasting people’s precious time doing nothing. I found myself always falling behind schedule. I had to cut valuable pieces of the session to make up for lost time.
I should have been focusing on quickly building engagement.
Instead, I was giving them every reason to turn their cameras off and start checking email.
When you start on time you show respect for the punctual group members. You set a norm that your sessions will start on time. And you build engagement from the get-go.
But starting on time still leaves a big question. How do you weave in the latecomers without crushing engagement?
That’s our Quest for this week🔎
👉How to start a workshop before it has even started with Dr. Myriam Hadnes
👉8 tips for weaving in latecomers without crushing engagement
Let’s jump in!
🔇How to start a workshop before it has even started
A LinkedIn post and 1-minute video by facilitator and podcast host Dr. Myriam Hadnes.
I recently discovered Myriam’s work. It was like stumbling on a facilitation treasure trove.
If you don’t know Myriam I highly recommend that you check out her work.
- She writes regularly on LinkedIn.
- She leads an online facilitator community called Never Done Before.
- She runs a podcast called Workshops Work on every facilitation topic under the sun. She created Mural Board that maps out all 185 episodes by topic.
OK… back to her post on latecomers. Hadnes shares some ideas on how to start a workshop before it has even started. Play music, do a mental download, introduce yourself in the chat, or start a little bit of chit-chat.
Check out the full post 👉here.
⌚8 Tips for weaving in latecomers without crushing engagement
Latecomers are a part of every group experience. Once I accepted that fact, I started to design sessions where I could welcome latecomers into the session without wasting time or losing the session flow.
The surprising thing? Latecomers get up to speed way faster than you think.
Here’s a Twitter thread I wrote with 8 tips for weaving in the latecomers👇
 Gwyn Wansbrough |
TL;DR
📝Share expectations
⏰Begin on time
🙌Thank punctual participants
💬Start with rolling engagement
🚫Don’t start over
🤦Don’t shame latecomers
👍Expect them to jump in
💡Prepare for latecomers
How do you weave in your latecomers?
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
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Creatively yours,
