In at the deep end. Taking your teaching online at short notice.
Last Tuesday one of my coaching clients made the decision with me to cancel her two day workshop booked for Friday and Saturday in London and deliver it online instead.
It was a hard decision to make, but the right one. Most of the 25 delegates were relieved, glad that they didn’t have to travel, and approached the new arrangements with an open frame of mind.
A couple were angry, and wanted refunds.
For my client, it was a tough couple of days of cancelling bookings and redrafting the workshop material to work in the new online context, as well as getting familiar with Zoom.
Communication
But most of all it was time spent communicating, managing expectations and making sure everyone understood the new arrangements and had everything they needed to make the most of the time.
Aside from a few technical glitches in the first few minutes, the workshop went smoothly. It was a big learning curve for everyone involved. My client hadn’t delivered a workshop in this way before, and quite a few of the delegates were new to Zoom.
Reading the room
The trickiest things turned out not to be the technical stuff, but delivering material without being able to really gauge people’s reactions. Are people understanding this, are they enjoying it, am I pitching it right? All the signals you’re used to reading in the room are harder to access online. You can see some of the delegates, but not everyone’s video worked, and some people stayed quiet.
Without the buzz of an audience to feed off, it can be hard to maintain energy and confidence.
Human connection
But overall there was a lovely sense of people supporting each other during the day. Real human connection and warmth, despite the fact the room was virtual not real. The comments at the end were overwhelmingly positive. People loved the experience and were grateful that they’d had the opportunity to learn in this way.
While my client wouldn’t have chosen to do it like this - we’ve talked about taking her teaching online, but that was always an idea for somewhere in the future - she has learned that she can do it, and that’s so valuable.
Knowing she can pivot has opened up the potential for her business and boosted her confidence.
Here’s what I learnt :
Three takeaways for unplanned online workshops
Get some tech support. If you’re not familiar with Zoom or whatever tech you’re using, have someone in the room with you who can handle it. You need to be able to focus on the teaching without worrying about sound, connectivity, other people’s wifi issues etc etc.
Have someone in the room who can keep an eye on the people. I kept an eye on the chat for my client, asking questions to check things had been understood, answering queries and feeding questions back to her at appropriate times. If you’re teaching you want to be able to stay in the flow which makes it hard to monitor the chat at the same time. We fell into a system where I’d group a few questions together and ask them to her when there was a natural break between topics. Also good for keeping the energy up, I think.
Necessity is the mother of invention. No one would deliberately plan their first online workshop with two days’ notice and no idea of the tech, but it’s doable. If you know your material and the key learning points, you’ll find a way to make it work in a new environment.
So I guess the biggest takeaway is that you can do it. These are strange and unsettling times, and we’re all going to need to find new ways to connect with clients and deliver our services.
Resourcefulness, flexibility and bravery are becoming the attributes we’ll all be relying on more and more over the next few months. Jumping in at the deep end is scary, but it’s a brilliant way to learn, and to discover just what you can do.
