Virtual Training - Virtual Team Building

It’s common for virtual leaders to worry that if they can’t see their employees, they can’t know if they are doing the work. Many leaders lack the confidence to develop their team members by giving them the authority and autonomy needed to flourish in their virtual roles. This erodes trust and inevitably leads to burnout for leaders who try to do it all. This interactive program will give you real world practice in delegating from a distance.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Recognize common delegation pitfalls and how to avoid them.
• Apply strategies to match the right person to the right task.
• Assign the right amount of authority and autonomy.
• Discover advanced planning of management and oversight.
• Plan and prepare the delegation of tasks.
• Provide effective feedback that empowers others to complete their assigned tasks.
• Overcome common virtual leader’s limiting beliefs about productivity and other issues.

Let go of control and feel confident that the right things are getting done in a timely manner. Effectively delegate with clearly articulated expectations. Empower your team and provide sufficient support to help them grow your business.

Virtual team leadership is a relatively new experience where most or all members of a team are working remotely. It has been found that 65% of experienced leaders have preventable failures in their first attempts at virtual teamwork. That percentage is even higher for new managers. If poor leadership behaviours go unchecked, they become entrenched and grow over time. These are highly preventable failures that negatively impact the entire organization.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Define the responsibilities of the new virtual leader.
• Develop strategies to keep your fingers on the pulse of your virtual team.
• Create techniques to strengthen your team's connection.
• Apply more strategic approaches to your communication.

You will be better equipped, more resilient and confident in mitigating issues. Expose the silent threats that pose potential pitfalls. Build on effective virtual leadership strategies that will benefit you, your team and the company.

So now you are assigning tasks virtually that were previously handled face-to-face. According to the Gartner Group, 50% of virtual teams fail due to a lack of understanding of how to work virtually. Your team members are likely experiencing frustrations and stress that can lead to dysfunction, resistance, and a failure to deliver on business objectives. Don’t blame the technology. Developing a high-performance team in a virtual environment takes a whole new set of leadership skills.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Build trust and connection for effective virtual team interaction.
• Practice communication skills to enhance collaboration and build resilience.
• Learn to spot common virtual teamwork issues and collaborate on solutions.

Boost your virtual team performance with skills to navigate their unique challenges. Build more trust, credibility and reliance as a team. High performing virtual teams have higher morale that increases productivity and job satisfaction. Creating a stronger and more interconnected virtual culture is essential to your resilience, economic prosperity, and competitiveness.

Virtual team meetings come with unique challenges that can cause you problems if not addressed right away. Distractions, multi-tasking and passive silence can be signs that your team members are feeling disconnected and dissatisfied. Ineffective virtual meetings can cost your organization thousands of dollars and negatively impact your capacity to compete.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Avoid the frustration of ill-equipped team leaders who mismanage problems that arise.
• Minimize time wasting and miscommunication due to inefficient discussions in meetings.
• Ensure team members are engaged and contributing to the meeting.
• Relay relevant information to the entire team before and after the meeting.

Meeting time means money. Use these proven techniques to optimize your meeting time and increase everyone’s productivity. Improving the virtual meeting skills of your leaders and managers is essential in today’s world and an investment that will be felt right away, and last into the future.

It’s only a matter of time before team dysfunction becomes a serious drain on energy, morale, and productivity. To avoid these pitfalls of operating a virtual team, the entire team needs to collaborate on ground rules and operating norms that they all agree to follow. We call that a Team Operating Agreement (TOA). The TOA sets out what are expected, acceptable behaviours and what aren’t, and how the team members will hold each other accountable. This session will take participants through the first 4 steps of creating and maintaining a Team Operating Agreement:

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Discuss what leaders and team members need from each other to work together more effectively.
• Discuss the needs of everyone on the team to work together more effectively.
• Identify actions and behaviours that are agreed on by the group.
• Learn 3 proven strategies to hold team members accountable to the agreement.

Set up your team for success with this powerful collaborative session. Giving them the opportunity to work through this together generates buy-in, guides the team’s actions and interactions, and provides a tool to refer to and help enforce valued behaviour. Imagine how much better an experience it can be for your virtual teams to be unified and working with purpose, clear about their team’s operating norms.

After this program, we recommend all participants join in a follow-up session.

It’s easy to learn something new, but hard to make it stick. Trying to align an entire virtual team and change individuals’ engrained behaviours needs on-going support. After the initial 4-step program, your team finished creating their Team Operating Agreement and put it into practice. During this session everyone gets to see how it’s working. Without accountability, respect and follow through, there is a danger that more problems can brew under the surface.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Share the experience of creating and using their Team Operating Agreement(s).
• Celebrate the successes and collaborate on how to overcome the challenges.
• Deepen their understanding of how to use and maintain their TOA.
• Develop new skills to adopt, adapt and evaluate the effectiveness of their TOA.

After completing the final 3 steps of the TOA process, your team will have a solid foundation to grow stronger together. When team members take ownership of their agreements to ensure it stays current to changing needs and to keep each other accountable, they can focus on what’s important for the organization. High performing teams are committed to each other and reach higher goals together.

The truth is, it’s more difficult for virtual team members to engage, connect, and work well with each other over time, than those who work face-to-face. Onboarding new members also requires additional management to successfully integrate them into the team. When new or existing members of a virtual team feel disconnected, team performance can suffer from a lack of engagement and low morale. Poor working relationships breed misunderstandings, interpersonal conflicts and absenteeism. It’s imperative to actively foster stronger virtual team connections so everyone can move past growing differences and get back to work.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Strengthen bonds and bolster engagement with five virtual team activities.
• Apply tools in any web conferencing application for more effective connection and collaboration.
• Create one team activity to build and sustain strong virtual relationships.

Equipped with this new set of interpersonal tools, your virtual team members can immediately mitigate team challenges in order to sustain strong relationships that bolster performance and productivity. A valuable outcome for your teams and your organization.

Every interaction has the potential to strengthen or break down a work relationship. Sadly, the latter is most often the case when different behavioural styles come into play. Virtual team members have the added disadvantage of not being able to pick up on some visual cues that speak volumes in understanding someone's intentions. Misinterpreting other people’s behavioural styles can lead to friction and lack of conflict resolution.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Identify strengths and challenges of each DiSC style in themselves and others.
• Develop strategies for identifying others’ styles with only virtual clues.
• Adapt communication and behaviour to any virtual working situation.
• Practice impactful team building activities for each of the behavioural styles.

The DiSC Behavioural Profile provides participants clarity as to their own behavioural styles, and insights as to those of others. By applying this methodology, your team will build and improve relationships one interaction at a time. More mindful communication enhances productivity, builds stronger relationships and creates the optimum environment for high performance teams.

All too often, a live online session is a one-way event with the speaker addressing the audience and limited audience interaction. With so many distractions, conflicting priorities and multitasking, even participants who want to be there will have a hard time focusing. It doesn’t have to be this way.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Review the advanced features of your web conferencing tool.
• Discover effective strategies to increase engagement.
• Discuss strategies to help you manage the challenges in your role as an online facilitator.
• Manage disruptive behaviours during your session.
• Discuss how to conduct meaningful debriefs.

Deliver highly engaging, irresistible online content that is just as interactive as a face-to-face session. Engaging participants in active chats. Using whiteboards and annotation tools for real time collaboration. Facilitating breakout rooms to deepening the learning and create closer connections between your online learners. This is just the first step in making your training experience as brilliant online as you are in a live training room.

In general, people make a subconscious judgement in the first few minutes of entering a new situation. They may even come into your online session with a predetermined idea of the experience. Particularly if they’ve had a bad virtual training in the past or are not particularly interested in the topic. You only have a few minutes to grab and keep their attention.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Deliver four new and exciting warm-up activities to jump start your session.
• Apply three creative and engaging ways to take attendance.
• Demonstrate two techniques to introduce the technology in a non-threatening way.
• Incorporate four after-break activities to re-energize your learners.
• Discover two ways to create an action plan.

At the end of the session you will be able to deliver more meaningful, impactful content in an engaging way right from the beginning of your training session. Keep it going with purposeful collaboration and interactions that are highly engaging and energizing. Take your training to the next level and leave your participants feeling more excited about future learning.

The key to any successful project, large or small, is effectively working as a team. Microsoft TEAMS enables you to manage your team with online meetings, calls and web conferencing. Their secure platforms allow you to share important information in a private environment while having live discussions and group chats. All the Microsoft Office applications integrate seamlessly into the TEAMS platform. Microsoft TEAMS provides you with all the tools you need to solve problems, meet objectives and achieve your goals.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Set up, manage settings and customize TEAMS to meet their needs.
• Schedule meetings and invite attendees.
• Create roles, add new users and organize teams.
• Conduct effective and efficient video meetings.
• Add and share files with their teams.
• Incorporate apps, bots, and connectors to add extra functionality.
• Operate TEAMS using a mobile device.

Technology allows us to connect with our virtual team but all too often the technology we have available to us is not used to its full capacity. In this session, we will devote time to exploring the advanced features of Webex. We will demonstrate how to encourage interactivity and collaboration while learning how to facilitate an interactive and productive virtual meeting or training event.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Access and use the advanced features of Webex.
• Demonstrate best practices to facilitate an engaging virtual meeting.
• Develop strategies to manage challenges in your virtual meetings.
• Create a personal action plan for continually expanding your capabilities.

In this course, you will develop technical and communication skills to produce a seamless online event. Learn the best practices of Virtual Producers to effectively support, communicate with, and maintain group norms with virtual learners and facilitators before, during and after the session.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Leverage and maximize relevant tools during an online session.
• Establish acceptable collaborative behavior for the producer and trainer.
• Effectively communicate with learners and facilitators from start to finish.

This course will prepare you for the full range of Producer duties, from supporting a small virtual workshop complete with breakout rooms to live webinars with hundreds of attendees. You will learn how to manage technical issues, create an effective back-up plan, and ensure you create an environment where technology challenges do not impact the learning or meeting experience.

IN THIS SESSION, PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Overcome technical issues behind the scene.
• Minimize technical interrupts during a session.
• Create a back-up plan to mitigate any unforeseen challenges.
• Create a safe environment for learners regardless of their comfort with technology.