Soft Skills workshop in remote delivery

I have lots of experience of running classroom soft skills workshops and there are various aspects of them that will be difficult remotely and some that will work:

• Presentation/tutor input - this is fairly straightforward to do remotely but not very engaging for the learners. But in a sense that's a benefit; most workshops need to cut right down on the tutor presentation anyway, and if remote working makes you do this, that's good! It would be best to convert this stuff into elearning/interactive self study, as a preparation for the workshop.
• Role-play, with tutor observation and feedback - this is going to be very difficult remotely; in particular you won't be able to observe body language properly.
• Case studies / scenarios - this is the main thing you can address remotely. 'How would you do this...' / 'In this situation how would you respond...' / 'what would you say if...' - these type of questions around particular situations can be addressed by taking answers from remote participants. I would normally use small-group discussion for this, but you'd have to do it slightly differently.
• Learners' challenges - perhaps some of them can pre-send some challenges that they face, and others could fire in suggestions, moderated by you?
• Action planning - taking suggestions from remote learners about what they intend to try out differently
• Summarising - all of above will be more powerful if you send out summaries of the essential discussion and action-oriented suggestions and ideas.

All in all, this sort of remote training will work better with a series of short modules, where you can follow up on ideas, hear peoples' stories, and so on. many would use webex for this. I'm not an expert on this technology but most of it seems to focus around PowerPoint. I don't like this - better to use a technology like Google Plus, with video hangouts if your systems can run to it.

Delighted to talk further. By all means send me a message john@agio-interactive.com

Thanks John,

We're loooking for what worked for people that are using remote workshops. 

Since with employes all over the globe, and managers that have hard time to take off full days for workshops - this is the only direction we can go in order to provide all of our employees - no matter where they are located - the solutions they need. 

I'm not looking for technological solutions. We have Adobe connect which is by far much more sofisticated from Webex, and allows for creation of small discussion groups from the participants. Or we can use with it Lync (Messanger for corporates) that allows for confrences and group discussions a-la Google Hangout as well.