Online Workshops: How to Improve Online Team Collaboration & Overcome Challenges

Remote teams and teams collaborating online face many challenges when it comes to online workshops and mutual relationships. Building a team over the screen is a difficult task that many team leaders fail to accomplish. Why? Because teams need mutual connection, coordination, and understanding. All of this is hard to build over the camera, especially once the video call ends and everyone's left on their own.

This makes online workshops hard to deliver successfully and requires everyone on board to make a collective effort and make it better. Below, we’ll discuss the most common challenges and pitfalls of online workshops as well as effective tips on how to overcome these challenges.

3 Biggest Challenges of Delivering Online Workshops Successfully

While online workshops may seem super-easy to deliver to someone on the side, team leaders, facilitators, and team members know how hard it can be. Here are the most common challenges teams face when trying to collaborate online.

1. Technical Details

The first challenge is the most obvious one. The technical aspect of the workshop is always the number one problem that occurs. 

Why?

Because there’s a dozen of people who simultaneously need to:

• have a proper internet connection

• have a working microphone and camera

• know the technical details of how to participate in the video call

If there’s only one weak link, the whole workshop can be negatively affected.

2. Lack of In-Person Contact

Lack of physical presence of the participants is the next challenge that can seriously lower the quality of online workshops. Lack of physical presence also means:

• inability to track body language and facial expressions of the participants

• inability to get proper feedback after the workshop is over

With a live workshop, participants would hang around, chatting and sharing their thoughts.

Instead, once the workshop is over, so is everyone’s communication and the exchange of energy, impressions, and ideas. 

3. Difficult Facilitation

Facilitators also face troubles in online workshops. They need to try and juggle multiple actions at once:

• follow everyone’s reactions and facial expressions

• share their screen and be careful what it’s showing

• take notes

• follow the materials they’ve prepared for the workshop

All of this is extremely hard when the workshop is online and their energy needs to be over the roof to keep everyone engaged.

3 Tips For Overcoming the Challenges of Online Workshops 

So, the challenges are present, but so are the solutions to these problems. The 3 tips listed below will help you make the most out of every workshop and prevent or overcome the potential issues.

1. Establish Better Communication

If you manage to improve the communication within your workshop, you’ll instantly improve its overall quality. There are several ways you can do this:

• be transparent and honest to set an example

• provide instant feedback on everything you find relevant

• ask for feedback from the participants for every activity and part of the workshop

• provide a safe space where everyone can leave comments e.g. group chat or team collaboration whiteboard

Inspire and provoke active communication whenever possible.

2. Find Assistance

As a facilitator, you don’t have to do it all on your own. You can ask some other participants to help you deliver the workshop. Assign them roles and tasks such as:

• taking notes

• keeping track of the technical issues and helping the participants overcome them

• overlooking participants’ engagement and activity

• screen sharing management

With only one additional set of hands and eyes, the facilitator will be able to focus on the more important aspects of the workshop.

3. Anticipate Problems

Finally, you need to be prepared for unexpected occurrences during a workshop and have a plan B in case anything goes wrong. For instance:

• participants are extremely demotivated

• you face a serious technical issue

• one of the participants is distracting others

Think about all the potential issues in advance and be ready to solve them on the go, without much thinking.

Final Thoughts

Yes, online workshops are hard to deliver, but they’re necessary for the remote workplace more and more companies are turning to. So, examine the challenges we’ve shared and think about the solutions we’ve offered. It’ll help you prepare and adjust for delivering truly effective and successful online workshops.