9 Best Practices for Successful Live Online Trainings and Online Collaboration

Many professionals think that online collaboration is inferior, because of the low level of interaction and commitment of the team members, too much unproductive idle time, too many distractions, and the lack of proper documentation of the results.

 

 

But, is this true?
Not at all! All of the above challenges can be solved more easily online than on-site, no matter if we’re talking about online training or meetings for a collaborative competitive/market intelligence project.

How do we know?
We’ve been providing on-site training in the field of competitive/market intelligence since 2004, and live online workshops, certifications, and conferences since 2019.

Read our 9 best practices for successful online live trainings that will help you in your digital transformation towards excellence in live online learning!

Best practice #1: Learning is most successful when it’s hybrid: a mix of live and online
Online training in general can be either self-paced or live. In our experience, most participants don’t actually start learning, e.g. reading a case study or preparing for a workshop, until the first live session forces them. The notion of an upcoming remote live meeting motivates all participants to get on board. Further, the expected peer pressure creates the urgency to take action and start preparing for the workshop.

Without this starting point, participants keep deferring their learning journey to a point when they expect they’ll have plenty of time. It’s quite obvious that this moment of time doesn’t exist for most of us.

Best practice #2: Don’t put everything into one day
It’s quite obvious that in-depth learning requires time to digest, time to reflect, and examples to put everything into your own perspective.
The difference between “having heard about a new methodology” and “having used it in a real world case study” determines whether you can immediately apply it to your daily work.

The traditional 1 or 2-day workshop was the preferred format, balancing the participants’ need to travel and time away from office with the build-up of knowledge. Typically, this format was not optimizing the learning process at all.

Our new schedules allow kick-offs, a preparation phase, live training sessions, and time for exercises in between.

Best practice #3: Make your trainings interactive
This sounds simple, but is often done wrong. The key success factors are discussions, exercises, and group work.

  • Let the team members introduce themselves, including their experiences and expectations regarding the topic at stake.
  • Use the interactive features of your conferencing tool, like polls, chats, breakout rooms, surveys, and recordings.
  • Use a virtual whiteboard tool for exercises – for individuals as well as for groups.

Best practice #4: Create commitment
At an on-site event, each team member is present, i.e. no one would dare to neglect the group by doing something else, such as polishing their nails. In online events, however, participants might easily lose focus by being distracted.

  • Ask the participants to permanently switch on their video cameras. Make sure you set rules like this at the very beginning of your session.
  • Avoid idle or waiting times, e.g. ask participants to use the chat for additional comments (to the group or to individuals).

Best practice #5: Use collaboration tools like virtual whiteboards
Virtual whiteboard tools allow participants to add sticky notes to a virtual whiteboard, arrange them, and draw arrows between them. This allows the group members to work in parallel on a problem and to document the results in one go. Online tools run much smoother than meta-planning tools and allow you to (re)use and refine your results in each process step.

  • At the beginning, use simple features like sticky notes, arrows, and different colors.
  • Alternate between brainstorming phases and consolidation phases. During brainstorming phases, the participants may write down their ideas in parallel to save time and reduce idle times.
  • During consolidation phases, discuss the results one by one to get a clear understanding of each concept or idea from the brainstorming phase,
    rearrange sticky notes, eliminate duplicates, and prioritize your ideas.
  • Use features like voting for prioritization.
  • Use comments, links, and colors to add details.

There are many possibilities and even templates for specific tasks, which make your life easy. It’s important to choose an intuitive and versatile tool. But don’t get to techie. Bear in mind that successful on-site exercises are also limited to very basic meta-planning tools.

A quick how-to tour should be scheduled upfront or at the very beginning of your session to allow familiarization.

Best practice #6: Group work needs a clear and straightforward, step-by-step structure
As a trainer, in an on-site situation you can easily improvise and react if the team doesn’t know how to proceed or how to structure their group work. In an online exercise, unclear communication and process flaws will cause delays or dissatisfaction among participants.

  • Create step by step instructions.
  • Assign processing times to each step.
  • Integrate the instructions into your collaboration tool, e.g. in a virtual whiteboard tool write the instruction beside the place for the results.
  • Explain how to use the collaboration tools in advance and plan for alternatives (“plan B”) to help any participants who encounter technical issues.

Best practice #7: Document the results
If you use whiteboard tools, results are immediately online and accessible. Virtual whiteboard tools allow you to export results as PDFs, present the results directly from the board, or embed the presentation in a website.

Make sure you don’t take shortcuts, and explicitly write down a short summary of the results, such as:

  • A management summary
  • A poster using graphs and diagrams
  • A list of all decisions made
  • An action list

Best practice #8: Recordings
Use the recording function for all elements of the training session that aren’t interactive.
This allows you to easily replay the training and document the results.

Usually your video conferencing tool is capable of directly archiving the recordings and embedding them within a learning platform. Also consider using your whiteboard tool as a learning platform and embed your videos within your whiteboard.

Best practice #9: Get feedback and improve
Receiving feedback sounds very simple. In on-site trainings or meetings this can be done more informally. In online trainings this needs more preparation.

Plan sufficient time to collect feedback immediately at the end of the session by means of a feedback round. You can also use polls and surveys. Feedback is important as we all need to improve our trainings – technical features are evolving quickly and participants are continuously “spoiled” by other formats of online interaction. This means that, as an organizer, you need to stay on top of recent developments. In-between feedback can be obtained through emoticons (helpful for getting a swift answer to questions). By requesting anonymous poll feedback on the presentation style and speed, participants can provide valuable input enabling the trainers to adapt accordingly.

Example

In our case challenge event that was part of our international Competitive/Market Intelligence Conference Spring 2022, competitive and market analysts evaluated Elon Musk’s intentions behind his Twitter bid.
Two groups used the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) methodology and both came to the conclusion that Musk was just in it for the money. The full example including all best practices can be viewed in the virtual whiteboard we used below.

 

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