Hybrid facilitation goals

- Ever joined an online meeting and the sound didn't work, most people had cameras off, and your company was blocking the link to the documentation you desperately needed to participate? Doesn't exactly feel very easy to do a good job. Let alone, try to connect to the other team members. But that's exactly it. It wasn't the technology is bad, it was that you were not able to connect and collaborate to achieve that desired outcome. And that engagement is the key to a successful hybrid event. So let's think engagement as the secret to a great facilitated hybrid meeting. Now, when you get that opportunity to run and facilitate a hybrid session, first, always start with the business needs. Define why you're meeting in the first place. This is normally some sort of business goal, like defining a plan, brainstorming solution ideas, or reviewing requirements. Get that defined first, a clear business goal. Then, you have to layer on your facilitation goals. Yes, there's two goals in every session you facilitate, yours and theirs. Theirs is easy, that's the business goal. Yours is how you want that goal achieved. And so, your work is to facilitate that outcome. Like for example, do you want everyone to participate? Or should everyone generate or add at least one idea? Or perhaps, you want everyone to agree to the decision? Or even each participant self-identifies an action they will take after the session. To help you with this, I've included a worksheet in the course handouts. Its simple structure can help you in building out your session goals. Go ahead and pause the video and try to think about the next meeting you're running, and fill out the worksheet. What business need are you solving? And so, what do you hope to accomplish by facilitating the session? As these things, these facilitated outcomes, are probably goals you'd want anyways, whether you're in a hybrid environment or not. The trick to making this happen then is to simply ask how you will get participants to engage to achieve these goals when working in hybrid formats. This is your planning work. But you need to have your goals clear first, the business goal and your facilitation work defined before you start thinking about time zones, cameras, and workspaces. The setup is what enables the collaboration and engagement to take place. You want to define the session goals, and then plan to make the engagement happen. 'Cause if you start to define a session focused on engagement, driven by your facilitation goals, and centered on achieving those business outcomes, then you can run a wildly successful hybrid event, no matter what kind of chaos, challenges, or technical hurdles try to cross your path.