Hello, thank you for taking the time to read this blog. Hopefully you will find it useful. It is the first in a series I am planning around Remote First facilitation techniques I am planning on trying. Given this is going to be a big part of our lives going forward I want to explore how we take common in room techniques and apply them virtually. I want to do more than just use a pre-made "Stop, start, continue" board a lot of the tools setup by default. I am currently constrained on my tools set (for reasons I won't go into), so will be limiting the tools I use to just Google Suites.
My first experiment will be Standing Surveys. So for those who don't know the term, a Standing Survey is where the facilitator poses a question to the team and they self organise in order around that question. It is commonly used as an icebreaker or to Connect learns when using Training from the Back of the Room techniques. Given the current circumstances and given this blog series is inspired by the increase need of people to work remotely very suddenly. I've choosen the question "When were you last in the office?" for this experiment.
So to make this an into a in room activity, a "Remote First" one as preperation I have created a frame in Jamboard. The frame has the question and answers as Stickies and team members will be represented by headshots (the headshots used here are not real people https://thispersondoesnotexist.com). This is how the frame looks.
I have also asked the Team to make sure they can have two screens/devices available for the Retro. One for the Google Meet video conference and one for interacting with the Jamboard frame.
When the retro is underway, and the Team are all on the Google Meet I will ask them to join the Jamboard and access the frame. I will then ask them to self organise their avaters into the relevant order. The only rule will be that each person is only allowed to move their own avatar.
For the retro I have actually prepared two such standing surveys, the second will ask the question "How long is it since you have been in the office". For the first I will say they can talk in the Google Meets call, but no side conversations via Slack or other means. For the second question I will remove that rule and see what difference it makes. We can then explore if side conversations are a good or bad thing as part of the rest of the retro.
I will post another blog late next week when I've conducted this retro and run the experiment.
Keep well,
Scott