Leading Successful Virtual Training & Team Building - During a Crisis

COVID hit at an inconvenient time for my team. We had just selected the next group of student leaders for our international peer mentoring program and were planning our intensive training and team building programs. Our mentors rely heavily on teamwork, mutual trust and relationships to achieve their goals, so letting team building slide when everything became virtual was just not an option.

We had to build resilient teams among a diverse group of 18 student leaders from 11 countries. They would be in different time zones. Many of them had never held a leadership position before. And now they needed to build such strong trust with each other that they could work together to inspire connection and trust in their mentees in the midst of chaos and crisis.

With my team, Estela Kite and Michael Ainbinder, I am proud to say we succeeded. Our student leaders have told me things like: "I never thought it was possible to bond online. But now I feel like I've always known my team even though we've only ever met online". "I'm connecting better with my virtual team this year than I ever did in-person last year. We regularly reach out just to check in even if we don't need something." I believe that this is a huge success.

Here’s what we did.

Spring 2020 International Peer Mentors in training

Break Up Boring Training Sessions

An 8-hour day of training may be bearable in-person, but online, it is torture... and it is sure to result in low participation and retention. Break up your sessions into chunks of maximum 1.5 hours each, providing either a guided activity or short free break in between. Max the training time for one day at 5 hours or so; online training is more draining for participants and organizers than in-person equivalents.

Prevent Unnecessary Awkward: Guide Initial Zoom Break-out Sessions

Zoom break-out sessions are a popular way to connect participants with each other. Be careful to avoid dumping participants into a break-out room without guidance however. My team created specific questions to answer and goals to achieve for each break-out session, and the result was highly successful.

Questions for break-out sessions should be succinct, original, and encourage complex discussion. Bite-sized questions at the beginning of the conversation encourage participation. Provide enough questions to keep conversation interesting even if the room is full of introverts who don't know each other.

A good set of reflection questions: What was one word that represents the concepts in this session to you? What was the most inspirational/practical/original strategy presented? What is one strategy presented that you think you'll never use? How will you incorporate one strategy from this session into your work next week? (These questions are precise, time-bound and get participants thinking in original and manageable ways).

A not-so-good set of reflection questions: What did you think about the session? What did you like best about the session? How will this session change the way you work? (These questions are broad, to be expected, and easy to answer with soundbites or canned answers).

Note from experience: If using Zoom, send the questions in the chat BEFORE sending participants into their break-out rooms.

Mix and Match Methods

Listen to one voice for too long, and you'll find yourself drifting. Use one online interaction method for too long, and the same thing will happen.

In the successful trainings my team facilitated, we swapped speakers at least every 0.5-1 hours, and we mixed in panels and participants speaking as well as presenters. This kept up participant interest and engagement.

Additionally, we swapped methods at least every hour. Though we mostly used zoom, we would change from the full group in a presentation, to small groups in guided break-out rooms, to the full group moving around for a team activity, to a full group guided discussion, to an offline break, etc.

Go Synchronous and Asynchronous

In order to accommodate different learning styles (visual, audio, kinesthetic) and the reduced training hours, we took a lot of the process-oriented training offline into pre-recorded videos and written modules.

For our team-building activities and games, we split time equally between guided activities on zoom (such as: team drawing and mad-lib competitions, pancakes vs. waffles, name games, cultural dimensions discussions, etc) and asynchronous, team-led, elective activities. For the latter, we told teams that each had a week to structure and run three hours of team-building however they wanted, but they had to send in a reflection telling what they did and how it worked at the end of the week.

Between the synchronous and asynchronous strategies, our teams build successful rapport and strong enough team cultures to now be creating team playlists and multitudes of inside jokes after merely a month and a half of virtual-only connection.

Interact with Physical Space

A priority in our team-building warm-ups and games was actual interaction with physical space. Two warm-up icebreakers we used are prime examples of this:

Exciting Sponge: Each participant show the group an object from their desk or workspace and make up a fantastic, fictitious story about the object. This game is entertaining, turns on participant creativity, and allows teammates to get to know how each other think better. It also interacts with actual physical space, making the training feel more real by bringing a physical object in their home into their memories of the experience.

Dance Challenge: Each participant models a short dance move to the group on Zoom. The full team must copy as best as they can, and the creator of the move judges when the team has completed the move satisfactorily. The creator of the move then nominates another participant to model a move.

Seek Feedback Often - And Use It

Your participants should feel like co-creators of their experience - so let them be part of it. My team allowed a few participants per training day to volunteer as feedback providers. At the end of the training day, these participants stayed back for a few minutes as we asked for their feedback. This direct and immediate feedback helped us improve the training each day - and when critical feedback was provided, we immediately implemented it into the next day's program.

Virtual training and team building is not easy. But my student leader teams are proof that it can be successful.

Not only have my student leaders bonded successfully beyond their and my expectations, they have also increased engagement with their mentees. For the first year, my student leaders have achieved 100% responsiveness from their mentees. I am deeply proud of them and of my team's work in training them.

You CAN lead successful, engaging virtual training and team building during the COVID crisis!