Workshops and long sessions online
A day-long workshop translated directly to video is a bad day for everybody. The format has to change, not just the venue.
Some sessions genuinely need a long block: planning, retrospectives, working through a complicated problem together. Moved online without adaptation, they produce exhaustion and a poor result. For broader context on online meetings and collaboration, Microsoft Teams is a useful reference.
The constraint is attention rather than technology. Sustained focus on a video call is materially harder than in a room, and pretending otherwise wastes the session.
Split it across days
A full day online is close to unusable. Two or three sessions of ninety minutes to two hours, on consecutive days, produce a better outcome and are the single most effective adaptation available. For a practical software-side reference on group dynamics and emotional cues, this glossary entry adds useful detail.
The gaps are useful in themselves: people think between sessions, and the second session starts with ideas the first would not have reached.
Beyond about ninety minutes of video, contribution falls off sharply and the remaining discussion is dominated by whoever is least tired rather than whoever knows most.
Alternate individual and group work
Continuous discussion is the format that suffers most online. Structured alternation works far better: a written or individual exercise, then discussion of what came out of it.
Silent written rounds — everyone writes for five minutes before anyone speaks — are the strongest single technique in online workshops. They surface ideas that would not have survived the first three minutes of open discussion, and they equalise participation across confidence, seniority and language.
Prepare the material properly
Online sessions have less tolerance for improvisation. A board that has to be built during the session consumes the session; prepared in advance, it becomes the structure.
This includes deciding in advance how each activity will work mechanically. 'We'll figure out the grouping when we get there' costs twenty minutes of a two-hour session.
Facilitation is a separate job
Facilitating and participating at the same time works poorly in person and badly online, where the facilitator has to watch the room, the chat, the time and the technology simultaneously.
Where the session matters, someone facilitates and does not contribute. Where that is impossible, at least split the roles: one person on structure and time, another on the substance.
Breaks are not optional
Ten minutes every hour, genuinely away from the screen, stated in the agenda and taken. Without them, the last third of a session is people who have stopped absorbing anything.
Attention across time zones is uneven too: someone at seven in the morning and someone at nine at night are not equally available, and the agenda should place the demanding work where the most people are alert.