March 2020 – At many companies, important workshops or meetings have been canceled because of COVID-19. Sounds familiar? And now you’re wondering how to continue and still achieve the set goals for your project? Don’t worry, the current COVID-19 situation does not have to mean a complete halt for collaboration and progress at work. Effective cooperation can very well take place in virtual formats. And by this, we mean more than “just” sending e-mails and talking on the phone. We at CPC have been working in global projects for years and designed all kinds of virtual workshop and collaboration formats.
During the COVID-19 crisis each of us is going through a change curve. Many people have now settled into their home office, often together with their kids sent home from school. After a few days of shock, this new situation is becoming somewhat “normal”. Nevertheless, some of us feel insecure about the multitude of remote or virtual collaboration tools available on the market and the opportunities that come with them.
We’re here to help. We want to share with you a short overview of possible scenarios, suitable tools and a checklist with tips and tricks for virtual collaboration. We draw on experience from our project work, both with clients and in our internal collaboration, as many of us have been working from home in distributed teams for quite some time. In addition, our colleagues from CPC China have been able to enrich this expertise recently due to the COVID-19 outbreak there.
You would not believe what high-quality results you can accomplish with well-prepared virtual formats! We dare to say: Almost anything is possible!
Here are some examples from our experience – ranging from formats for small teams to really large groups (you find more use cases in the table below):
- Virtual team canvas sessions to align and break down corporate strategy to team levels
- Virtual process simulations to validate, improve and / or train processes and collaboration models
- Global sprint work in remote teams and breakout sessions around the globe with time-flexible, virtual tools
- Lessons learned workshops and retrospectives via virtual whiteboards
- Meaningful and sensitive culture and leadership work with >1.000 employees and leaders
- Training and enabling formats via eLearning nuggets and web conferences
- Global townhalls with strong engagement of the participants
As uncertain and challenging current times feel, as exciting and different the future could become. In the last few days we have noticed that many of our customers do not cancel or put on hold important projects. They try to find a way with virtual workshops, remote townhalls and online training formats.
From our experience, you should focus on 4 success factors: 1) The meeting format and design, 2) a thorough preparation of content and participants, 3) selecting the right tools and 4) a solid moderation.
We are happy to share our experience, to help you analyze what make sense for your purposes and how a workshop design with your specific requirements could look like. Again, it is not a mere tool question.
If you need help, get in touch with us. We are in full operation even during COVID-19.
Use cases and suitable tools for virtual collaboration – our recommendations
To give you some inspiration for your challenges we compiled a list of use cases, real-life examples and possible tools to use in virtual collaboration. Just have a look at the table below.
Good to know: Currently many providers have special offers / free licenses to support remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic!
