Top tips for facilitating great workshops
Workshops are more than just presenting compelling content, and facilitating a successful workshop is more than just keeping your audience engaged.
In reality, workshops involve adapting to different contexts, creating memorable experiences (so participants remember what they’re learning!), and ensuring your participants walk away happy, armed with a tonne of new useful information!
That’s why we’ve delved into some insights from a workshop expert, Leanne Hughes, who is a seasoned workshop facilitator with an extensive history in making workshops work. She’s also the author of the 2-Hour Workshop Blueprint: Design Fast. Deliver Strong. Without the Stress. Here are the top tips she’s shared with us on designing and facilitating impactful workshops:
The two-hour workshop model
Keep it short, sharp and shiny. The effectiveness of two-hour workshops has been proven time and time again. It gives you time as the facilitator to warm up participants, deliver content, engage in activities, and provide time for a deep dive and wrap-up. So, two hours is the sweet spot!
The ‘SPARK’ framework
Leanne Hughes’ SPARK framework is an end-to-end process for designing workshops:
Setup (S): Understand your audience and the context of the workshop.
Power Up (P): Energise yourself and engage participants from the start.
Activities (A): Focus on interactive and engaging activities, making up the bulk of the workshop.
Review (R): Allocate time for reflection and review, enhancing retention.
Keep (K): Prioritise continuous improvement, refining resources and processes after the workshop.
Engage early, engage often
To combat potential disengagement, kick off with an unpredictable start to the workshop. Instead of the traditional introduction and housekeeping, try starting with a story or activity to capture participants' attention immediately. Create your very own pattern interrupter to set the tone for an engaging session - make sure your story is a good one!
AI can help your workshop design!
We all love some good use cases for artificial intelligence (AI), and this one is no different. Try incorporating AI into your workshop design by using it for ideation, brainstorming, creating quizzes, and even generating visuals. AI serves as a valuable tool for creativity, efficiency, and inspiration in the workshop design process but make sure you rely on human intervention for the actual content and edits.
Personalise your workshops, every time
When pitching workshops to leaders or stakeholders, try to emphasise the results and transformation - not just the workshop itself. The ‘big wigs’ don’t care much for the content, but they’ll listen for the outcome. Try to consider the holistic context, addressing organisational goals, and tailoring the workshop to support those objectives. You could even emphasise how it fits into your workplace strategy!
Running a great workshop involves careful planning, engagement strategies, and a focus on real, tangible results. To get there, make sure to leverage your own key and niche topics, consider the SPARK framework for workshop design, and get onto the AI trend as a creative helping hand. By engaging participants early and often and emphasising the broader outcomes, workshop facilitators can be fairly sure that their participants will walk away not bored, and well-versed in whatever topic you’re workshopping.
