Facilitation Skills for Leading Remote Teams

Most people leading teams find the transition to working remotely far more challenging than they expect. The whole pattern of communication is drastically altered, despite the technology. For example, the free flow of interaction is curtailed and fragmented, immediacy of communication diminishes, collaboration breaks down, and opportunity to observe work behaviour is lost. What’s more, in the usual workplace, there are no children, pets, household tasks, or other distractions from normal workflow.

In short, the usual office context is finely tuned, with well-practised ways of delivering efficiency, and much of that gets turned on its head. That leaves many leaders lacking a normal sense of control, and feeling that they are flying blind. A leader needs to re-establish visibility, accountability, productivity, and transparency in the remote context.

How can this be done? It’s here that remote facilitation skills are critical, and these are not the same as those used in the office.

To take just a few examples. What’s a better way of running a regular team meeting? What are some tips for planning remote sessions to make them engaging and interactive? How can individuals’ work be made visible in a way that will promote productivity? How can cohesion and collaboration be built up? How can participation be balanced? To get all this right, it is vital to have a strong command of foundational skills.

In this engaging and interactive masterclass, you will learn the foundational skills in facilitating remote work, and will introduce you to the huge potential that lies in transition to this way of working.

Your participation in this masterclass will help you to:

• gain insight into what’s different about leading remote teams
• improve the quality of remote interaction
• appreciate the utility of third-party tools in promoting interactivity and transparency
• identify one development goal that you will focus on to build facilitation skills for leading remote teams.

• Identifying barriers to effective remote working in your context, then gaining skills that will remove those barriers, including:

• guidelines for setting up collaborative online spaces
• effective remote engagement
• promoting balanced, inclusive and safe participation
• introduction to third-party tools that augment Zoom, Skype, etc.

Business owners and people leaders