Hi all! I'm from Rotterdam NL 🇳🇱. Just joined!

@David Newman Thank you!

Thank you⁣ all for sharing. I always need some time to recover, before I can learn something. If I really went down in flames I am unable to sleep. Sometimes even for days because I feel guilty towards the group, or angry at myself for not seeing something straight away. It litterally haunts me until I find a way to process what happend. What are some of the ways you recover, and how does it help you?

I set up a meet and greet event to reconnect after the holidays. It needed to be a hybrid event because of people being all over the globe next to the community that works in the head office. We made it breakfast so the east could participate with Europe. This immedeately cut out the Americas. But the real problem was that I did not test the set up. We had standing tables for the live participants to hook up at and on each table was a laptop with a Teams connection for the online participants. We created break out room in Teams to circulate the onliner and also mixed out the live participants to have new groups each 20 mins. Groups had conversation prompts to help start a good conversations but were free to choose topics. I thought what could go wrong in a simple meet and greet?! Well a lot of things as it turned out. The sound of the laptops was drowned out by the live groups at the tables so people drifted out to other rooms to be able to hear their online colleagues. The breakout rooms spontaniously disconnected, bringing people back in the main room which now had now live participants in it. We could not inform the whole group of what was happening and what needed to be done to fix it, because they were all over the place. It was just a mess. In end only a few online participants left, and there had been good conversations, but I felt awful afterwards, completely drained of energy.

@Akshay Chillal Do you use a touchscreen TV for this or are participants working on laptops? I could image that virtual post-its on a large screen would work, but how does that tie in with working alone together? ⁣I have so many questions about how to organize the logistics of a hybrid session, I don't know where to begin.

Plan some form fysical activity, especially for all day events. Could be anything. Like an after lunch walk, or a reflection walk. Really any exercise that requires standing up and moving around the room. Even moving furniture around for the next exercise can help to avoid after lunch dips or early morning start up issues that require more than just coffee. I find it keeps people more engaged. Being engaged fysically also helps disconnected team members to reconnect to the group and the goal of the workshop.

I still think that even if we call it the basics, that these are all very valid points and important to share. I have been to plenty of workshops and have seen plenty of facilitators lose sight of these basics/tricks. Wether it was because of inexperience or just cutting corners, or to save time, it is easy enough to lose track of the basics. Maybe the here message is that you can't just set up a workshop and expect good results. You need to really put in the work to hit ALL the bases if you want to succeed.

@Adamma Stekovics @Joao Ribeiro @David Newman @Rebecca Courtney @Jakub Michalski Thank you, I feel really welcome!⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣