Introduction

Now More Than Ever: We Need to Interact and Engage

Creating outstanding online meetings, webinars, and training programs can be difficult, whether you’re a novice instructional designer or facilitator, or an expert. This has always been true. But then 2020 came along, and with it, the COVID-19 pandemic and a significant increase in remote work and virtual events.

On one hand, the events of 2020 and the years that followed helped to normalize meeting and conducting training online. For people in job roles that shifted to working remotely, online meetings became the norm. According to research by ON24, the use of webinars increased 162 percent and attendance quadrupled in 2020. And a study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) in October 2021 found that virtual training went from being an infrequently used approach (with 51 percent of survey participants indicating it comprised 20 percent or less of their organization’s instructor-led training) to by far the more commonly used approach (with 83 percent indicating it comprised 80 percent or more of their instructor-led training since the onset of the pandemic; Stone 2021; Figure I-1).

On the other hand, the shift was so abrupt and so broad that many people struggled—at least at first—to feel comfortable using Zoom, Teams, Webex, and other such platforms on a more regular basis. Making sure online meetings, webinars, and training programs were interactive, engaging, and effective was seen as a noble goal—but first everyone just needed to get through the day-to-day of their new way of working.

FIGURE I-1. SURVEY OF VIRTUAL TRAINING USE, OCTOBER 2021

Due to the urgency of the situation, many meeting leaders, webinar presenters, and virtual trainers fell into bad habits. For veterans of these platforms, it simply meant more—a lot more—of what they’d been experiencing for the past two decades: Leaders, presenters, and trainers lecturing. Participants finding the events uninteresting, resorting to multitasking, or zoning out. Poorly conveyed information leading to training scenarios that weren’t able to drive optimal knowledge, skills, or behavior change.

Research makes clear that online meetings, webinars, and training are here to stay, even after the COVID-19 pandemic fades into the rearview mirror. Some people will continue to work remotely indefinitely (likely more than did so pre-pandemic), while many others will work in hybrid scenarios, spending at least some time each week or month working remotely. Additionally, 69 percent of participants in the i4cp study indicated that their organization planned to conduct 60 percent or more of their instructor-led training virtually going forward—a massive increase over the 22 percent who used virtual classroom training that frequently prior to 2020.

Before diving into the technology and the actual activities presented throughout this book, let’s take a minute to define and describe virtual meetings, webinars, and virtual training.

Virtual Meetings

A virtual meeting, as the term is used in this book, is much more than a conference call in which multiple people are using the same audio or video call to discuss strategy, a project, or another joint concern. Virtual meetings allow participants to share their screens, content slides, videos, and more. Participants can text chat with one another in addition to talking by audio. And they can collaborate on whiteboards while taking notes. Platforms for virtual meetings include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoToMeeting, and Adobe Connect.

The trend toward more virtual meetings started as early as the mid-1990s, when the International Teleconferencing Association reported that the teleconferencing industry in North America had grown 30 percent a year between 1993 and 1997. And then in 1999, Webex ran an ad campaign starring RuPaul and using the slogan, “We’ve got to start meeting like this!”

By 2012, 60 percent of C-level executives in North America surveyed by Frost & Sullivan said they were using web conferencing tools in their companies. Fast forward to March 2020 and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic led online meetings to become the standard approach for millions of employees who were now working remotely.

The events of 2020–2022 have proven the futility of making long-range predictions about most things, including the future of work. That said, it seems pretty clear that even as some companies revert to more on-site work, and therefore decrease their use of virtual meetings in coming years, the genie is out of the bottle. Online meetings have been normalized for just about all purposes: sales calls, deal completion, project updates, team building—almost any kind of meeting imaginable really.

Even with this sudden boost in experience with and focus on virtual meetings, we all still have more experience—going back to our earliest childhood days—meeting with others in person. So, most people are still learning how to make virtual meetings as effective as (or better than!) the in-person meetings they are used to. Including some activities, such as those provided in chapter 4, is one way to increase interactivity, engagement, and ultimately the value for the meetings you design, lead, and participate in.

Webinars

Web conferencing as it is known today arose in the late 1990s, and somewhere along the line the term webinar became the portmanteau of web and seminar. Broadly, a webinar is a live presentation that occurs over the web. It is different than a virtual meeting, because while there can (and should) be interaction with the audience, a webinar presentation is largely happening in one direction: from one or more presenters to a potentially very large audience. Webinars are most commonly used in marketing to educate potential customers about the features of a new product or service. Educational or thought leadership geared webinars, on the other hand, share information about a topic without a direct intention of selling a product or service.

This book primarily uses the size of the audience to distinguish between a webinar and a virtual training event, because this factor determines how much the facilitator can interact with participants—and thus the ways that the facilitator can engage participants through activities. Webinars have several dozen or even hundreds of participants, whereas virtual training programs are best designed for a maximum of 20 participants. Many of the techniques for keeping a webinar or virtual training audience engaged are similar, but some activities and approaches are more effective with a smaller group.

Some facilitators refer to their recorded online presentations—whether scripted recordings with no audience present or recordings of what were live events with an audience at a specific date and time—as webinars. In either case, the person watching the recording has no opportunity to interact with the presenter or anyone else. This changes the engagement potential drastically, reducing the audience from participants to simply viewers. These programs are thus a different concept from webinars, and so deserve a different name. This book will follow others, such as Cindy Huggett’s The Virtual Training Guidebook (2014), and call them “webcasts,” because they are so similar to broadcast television programs.

Just as virtual meetings (and virtual training programs) can be executed very well or very poorly, so too can webinars be interactive and engaging—or boring lectures that quickly drive participants to multitask or, worse, snooze. That didn’t change much during the 2020s spike in webinar usage—and for some, the situation might have actually gotten worse.

BACKSTORY

But there’s an antidote: well-designed activities meant for large audiences that make the most of the tools available in the webinar platform. This book provides many openers, icebreakers, and closers that can be used in these events, plus an entire chapter full of activities specifically designed for webinars (see chapter 5).

Virtual Classroom Training

Online training, or e-learning, comes in a few varieties and goes by many names. The talent development industry rightfully distinguishes between that which participants perform on their own at any time and that which participants attend with an instructor (and usually other participants) at a set date and time. The first type of online training is often called self-paced e-learning, on-demand e-learning, or asynchronous e-learning. Its popularity since the 1990s has been fueled by their appealing 24x7, anytime-anywhere nature; the rise of vendors with large libraries of off-the-shelf self-paced courses; and the growth of rapid e-learning development tools that create everything from basic voice-over PowerPoint courses to rich animation and video courses to more advanced simulations with branching logic. For some in the industry, this type of online training has even become synonymous with the word e-learning.

The second type of online training is in some ways the opposite of self-paced, individual courses. It too goes by several names, such as virtual classroom, virtual instructor-led training (vILT), synchronous online learning, and live online training. At its essence, it is a training experience in which multiple participants and one or more facilitators (such as a trainer and a producer) come together at the same time in an online classroom that allows them to communicate, interact, and collaborate with one another; view presentations, videos, or other content; and engage in large- and small-group learning activities.

Each type of online learning has its pros and cons (see chapter 6). And both were already increasing in use during the first two decades of the 21st century, before the outbreak of COVID-19 eliminated, seemingly overnight, the use of traditional, in-person instructor-led training for all the workers who suddenly found themselves working remotely. That led to an increase in online training, including a shift in virtual classroom training from being a trending but niche approach to one that was quickly normalized.

A host of factors will likely keep virtual classroom training at the forefront of employee learning. While self-paced e-learning has the advantage of scheduling flexibility, virtual classroom training retains the benefits of the in-person classroom experience while lacking most of its downsides. Research from i4cp in October 2021 made clear the key drivers for the continued use of virtual classroom training (Figure I-2). At that time, continued concern for the safety and health of employees was still paramount, making it the number-one driver indicated. But other top drivers of the use of virtual classroom training will outlive the COVID-19 pandemic, such as cost savings from the reduction in travel and physical classroom space, the now better-proven effectiveness of virtual training at meeting learning objectives, and the scalability compared with in-person instructor-led training.

So regardless of what the future holds in terms of remote and hybrid work, it seems that virtual classroom training has now matured well beyond a niche approach and will continue to be a critical way of imparting knowledge, increasing skills, and changing behaviors.

FIGURE I-2. PRIMARY DRIVERS OF VIRTUAL CLASSROOM TRAINING

But, as with online meetings and webinars, much virtual classroom training is still not as engaging and effective as it could be. This was excusable in 1999 or even 2010, because the platforms were new, best practices were not easy to come by, and the focus was not on adding engaging activities. Now that virtual classroom training has become nearly ubiquitous, however, there is no excuse for boring, lecture-style live online training. (Such events might as well be called “dead online.”) The activities and other tips found in this book are the remedy to poor virtual training experiences (see especially chapter 6). Research by i4cp presents a snapshot of the broad range of activities that organizations are using in virtual classroom training in particular (Figure I-3).

FIGURE I-3. ACTIVITIES USED DURING LIVE VIRTUAL TRAINING EVENTS

Engaging Through Activities

Participants in online meetings, webinars, and training events want and need them to be great experiences. But what do great experiences look like? The business buzzword answer has long been that it’s all about participant engagement—and for once the buzzword is on track. A great online meeting engages all participants, while still achieving its objectives. A great webinar that gets information to stick engages participants as much as possible even with a large audience. And a great training event engages learners so that they retain knowledge, gain new skills, and see the desired behavior changes and performance improvements.

Engagement in live online events looks essentially the same no matter what the context. Table I-1 shows the difference between an engaged participant and a disengaged attendee.

TABLE I-1. ENGAGED PARTICIPANTS VERSUS DISENGAGED ATTENDEES

Put another way, meeting facilitators need to stop running their online meetings like a typical marketing webinar, where they read PowerPoint slides to a large, mostly passive audience, only allowing for a few questions if there’s time at the end.

Webinar facilitators need to stop assuming their webinars can serve as robust training programs. Such events have large audiences and don’t allow for collaboration, hands-on or other realistic practice, expert coaching, and so on, which are the interactions needed for robust training to take place. Facilitators are setting participants up for disappointment and failure if they expect anything more than knowledge-level learning from a webinar.

And if online facilitators are expecting rich training outcomes—changed behavior and improved performance—they need to design their live online training programs in a way that enables such results. They need to limit participants to a reasonable number (a maximum of 16 to 20); break out the audience into even smaller groups for activities; engage via audio, chat, and whiteboarding; and think of the event in the same way they would an in-person training session.

Well-designed online activities—those aligned with and in support of the event’s goals—are critical to maximizing engagement and avoiding these tendencies. They provide structure and purpose to interaction and collaboration. They keep facilitators from becoming captive to the features of their live online platform tools.

Facilitators need to avoid using polls just to break up an otherwise lecture-driven webinar or to randomly ask a question in chat during an online training event; otherwise, they are simply falling victim to “shiny object syndrome”—the “Ooooh! Aaah! That feature is nifty. I’ll use it!” response. Facilitators should not use a tool just for the sake of using it. Rather, they should use it in support of the goals of the meeting, webinar, or training event.

That said, getting accustomed to the technology is the first step to knowing what is possible during online meetings, webinars, and training events. Facilitators need to become so familiar with the technology that they don’t notice it anymore—that using it becomes as natural as using the tools found in classrooms and conference rooms for in-person meetings and training events.

What You’ll Find in This Second Edition

So how can virtual facilitators captivate online participants and get them to interact and engage? With an expanded collection of more than 75 activities ranging from openers and icebreakers to closers, this new edition offers a host of ways to ignite online events, specifically online training programs, meetings, and webinars. Accompanying many of the activities are backstories, mostly from Kassy LaBorie’s nearly 25 years of experience, which provide the context for their inspiration. We’ve also taken what we’ve learned since publishing the first edition and provide updated competency models for both trainers and producers, as well as our latest insights on using advanced techniques and features.

Chapter 1 focuses on the technology platforms themselves and explains industry terms such as chat, annotation, and breakouts. It also discusses the producer’s role, which is critical to successful online events. Chapters 2 through 8 make up the meat of the book, providing examples of activities arranged by type. Welcomers and warm-ups—activities delivered before a live online session begins—naturally come first (chapter 2). These are followed by icebreakers—activities for the beginning of a live online event (chapter 3). Chapters 4 to 6 provide activities specific to meetings, webinars, and training events. Chapter 7 presents closers, and chapter 8 offers some fun activities for celebrations, such as holiday parties, good-byes, and baby showers.

Chapter 9, similar to chapter 1, focuses on online platform features, but goes into more depth on some key advanced features. Chapter 10 wraps up the book and provides some concluding thoughts, including guidance on how to convert or create your own online activities.

It’s not a requirement to read the chapters in order, from cover to cover. Think of Interact and Engage! as a recipe book. Virtual facilitators, producers, and instructional designers can flip through these pages and jump to the chapters most appropriate to their interests and needs.

Now, let’s begin!