Virtual Facilitation

3The Virtual Facilitator

The virtual facilitator can be anyone in an organisation who is responsible for a meeting or a workshop. As the facilitator, you will be the person running the session. Virtual facilitation is not easy – the facilitator has to run the process, control the tech and always needs to be ‘above the process’, which means they are constantly considering whether the current activities are bringing the group closer to their shared goal.

From experience, we know that virtual facilitation is a skill to be trained in and learned. You might even call it an essential twenty-first-century skill.

Developing the skills for virtual facilitation

Some people might believe that they either have what it takes or they don't to be a facilitator. We believe that anyone can train themselves to be a good virtual facilitator. There is a lot of work involved in this process and you need to get as much experience as you can. Gaining this experience primarily comes from facilitating sessions. The knowledge we're sharing with you in this book is only part of the process – you need to apply this many times for it to become a skill.

You need certain knowledge, such as how to design your meetings in a brain-friendly and effective way, and you need to know about the tech side of things too, such as the platform you're working with and how best to use it. You also need to know about your participants, and this will, of course, change between each session.

But the more experience you ...