In today’s global business world, virtual meetings are more and more the working norm. They save travel costs, they are environmentally friendly and they and enable global teams to stay connected on a daily basis. Unfortunately  most virtual meetings that take place are poorly structured, uninspiring and ineffective and do not take advantage of the full possibilities of the virtual world. Grape People has created a series of facilitated solutions that help you to make your virtual meetings more effective, more collaborative, more creative, and more motivating.

Grape People offers a four session training program that lets you discover the best virtual meeting practices through a hands-on approach. The program concentrates on typical meeting situations and with the help of simple facilitation methods transforms them into collaborative and energetic virtual team meetings. Each training session builds on the previous one and prepares you for the next one. Already after the first session you understand the essential building blocks of a collaborative status meeting and after the last session you will have gained the necessary competences to organise and facilitate good virtual meetings.

Competences gained

- Setting up effective everyday meetings and workshops on virtual platforms
- Best practices for technical challenges
- Getting your group ready, focused and goal-oriented in cyberspace
- Achieving virtual dialogue on and off-line with your co-workers and customers
- Separating the roles of the participants to gain clarity
- Understanding the different types of meetings to get results
- Gaining trust in a virtual environment
- Reviewing and maintaining progress virtually
- Making virtual decisions and action plans

Free Demo session

You can get a taste of what our virtual trainings are like by participating in our free Demos. The session will cover the best virtual meeting practices and teach the simple use of facilitation tools to make meetings more effective. If you are interested, please contact Pepe Nummi.

The four virtual sessions

Session 1: “Status update meeting”

Status update meetings are common for virtual teams that work together on a project. They include information sharing, decisions on action steps and revisions of action plans. The biggest challenge with status update meetings is to keep all team members involved and committed. Grape People will show you how virtual facilitation tools can be used to improve status update meeting processes. You will learn how bigger groups can be split into efficient parallel working teams where everybody is involved and stays focused. You will be an active hands-on member during the entire meeting process and experience how a transparent and collaborative decision making process creates commitment to action plans.

Session 2: “Behind the scenes of a status update meeting”

In this session Grape People will show what happens behind the scenes of a collaborative meeting, and what the facilitator of the meeting does to guarantee a smooth and efficient process for the group. You will have a closer look at different facilitation tools and see how these tools can be used for reflection, information sharing, group discussion and decision making. You will be practicing virtual facilitation methods hands-on. Grape People will show you for instance what technical steps are needed for dividing participants into breakout spaces but will also go through the issues that you need to have in mind to make sub-group work effective. You will get complete documentation of the process including all the documents that are used before during and after the session.

Session 3: “Workshop”

Virtual teams, as all teams, find it challenging to create trust and set ground rules for effective collaboration. In traditional meetings these issues are often resolved by spending time face to face, but virtual teams rarely or never meet face to face, and these challenges need extra attention. With the help of the latest virtual facilitation methods these issues can be addressed and worked on by the entire team. In this session, Grape People will take you through a facilitated workshop process. You will be working hands-on with a virtual team generating ideas, narrowing down options, taking decisions and making action plans.

Session 4: “Challenges and opportunities of virtual workshops”

In this session you will combine the use of facilitation tools that you have learned in the previous sessions to facilitate a demanding collaborative virtual meeting situation. We will practice virtual workshops, share experiences and learn how to deal with different virtual meeting situations. Workshops are highly cooperative meetings, where situations emerge and evolve, and you as a virtual facilitator will need to know when to activate the group and when to step back. We will try out and practice the beginning, end and the different stages of a workshop meeting and also have the opportunity to learn different styles from each other. We will concentrate on making the challenges of virtual meetings into collaborative opportunities and pay special attention to technical problems and best practices for dealing with them. You will end the training program with full documentation of your learning process.

Technical details

In these training sessions we will be using the: "Webex training center" software combined with a telephone conference service. All you need is a PC or an Apple with an internet connection and a telephone. All of the tools and techniques that you learn in VirtualGrape sessions can be adapted to any other software you are currently using if your software supports break-out sessions.

Cost

Fee for the entire package (four sessions) is: 800 Euros (+ VAT, if your billing address is in Finland).

Your trainer

Pepe Nummi is an experienced facilitator and expert in facilitation tools and techniques. Grape People is itself a virtual team and uses all of the tools and techniques presented in the above sessions in their own internal meetings. During recent years Grape People has succesfully developed effective virtual meeting practices for an array of clients.

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