3-2-1: Workshop Weekly #19 And we're back! I'm trying some new things the coming weeks (for example the 2 Async Automations). Please let me know what you like or did not like, so that I can fine-tune to your needs. Topics for today: Meetings vs Workshops, automated check-ins, and gamifying automations. Let's go! – Arthur

3 Workshop Examples

1: Meetings vs Workshops

In mid-2020, my head was about to explode.

All my days looked like this:

• Start work
• Long meeting
• Quick meeting
• Lunch meeting
• Another meeting
• Last meeting of the day
• Finish workday

The client I was working for was not prepared for the lockdowns. The sudden shift to working remotely made them recreate the office online.

But recreating the office online burns you out.

And meetings are the worst.

❌ Meetings: updates and endless discussions without decisions.

✅ Workshops: problem-solving, decision-making, and team-building.

Most meetings can be an email, Loom video, or well-written status updates.

However, the meetings that are actually needed are often badly prepared because of the lack of time everyone has.

Changing a meeting culture in a big organization is hard.

How do you help a lot of people have fewer and better meetings?

That frustration in 2020 made me start Workshop Wednesday.

I could reach way more people with YouTube videos and practical workshop templates.

🤝 Fewer meetings: Replace unnecessary meetings with async methods.

💡 Better meetings: Turn meetings into workshops geared towards active participation and problem-solving.

Fast-forward to today and 4,674 people have downloaded one of my templates.

You are one of them.

Thank you for being on this journey with me! 🙌

I have planned a lot of new, exciting things for 2024.

(Like generating full Miro workshops based on a challenge your team has)

If you have any ideas or questions for this newsletter, just hit reply and let me know.

But for now, let's continue with this week's tips below 👇

​

2: Productize your workshops

Creating a workshop takes time.

(Sometimes a LOT of time.)

So you don't want to run workshops once.

I have a system set up in Miro and Notion that makes it easy for me to duplicate (parts of) workshops.

But I still make the mistake of designing workshops from scratch every now and then.

If you have designed a good workshop, repeat and improve it multiple times.

You’ll save yourself and your team a lot of time while getting better results.

Think of:

• Weekly Team Workshop
• Quarterly Goal Planning Workshop
• Feedback Fiesta Workshop (more about this one in example 3 below)

​

3: Feedback Fiesta

Three signs of ineffective feedback that stops team growth and development:

• The fear of negative feedback prevents open communication within the team.
• The lack of feedback loops results in repeated mistakes and low performance.
• Ambiguous or infrequent feedback stunts individual and collective improvement.

Help your team learn the art of giving and receiving constructive feedback. Your team’s productivity will go from 😕 okay to 🤩 great rapidly.

A workshop agenda that you could use for this:

• Goal of today 🏆: How might we give and receive feedback to help each other improve?
• Breaking the ice 🧊: What would make this workshop successful for you?
• Gather data 💾: Play an agile game that engages the whole group, like Alphabetazion, Point Game, or Sudokuban.
• Generate insights 🕵️: Let each participant give someone else feedback based on their behavior and actions during the game. Give guidance on how to give and receive feedback.
• Decide what to do 📋: After everyone has given and received feedback, ask people to write down at least one action item for themselves. They should finish it within the next two weeks.
• Check out 💡: What is your key takeaway from this session?

Let me know how it went 💪

Ps. If you want the agenda above as a Miro template, have a look at my Retrospective templates.

---

2 Async Automations

1: Automated check-ins

"Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted." - The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication​

One feature I love of Basecamp is their automated check-ins.

Each week everyone in the company answers the same question:

• What will you be working on this week?

Having a simple shared document creates a level of transparency that's impossible to recreate with a meeting.

Three easy ways to recreate this feature in other tools:

• Calendar: Create a recurring weekly event, with a link to a shared document (e.g. in Google Docs or Confluence).
• Slack:
• Notion: Create a database for your notes and plan one of your templates to repeat weekly.

​

2: Automate to save time

Enable smooth-as-butter collaboration with smart workflows in your project management tool.

Some use cases to consider for your team:

• When a support ticket's priority changes to High, set a specific assignee who can lead it.
• When a project status changes to complete, notify #project-status in Slack.
• When a task is started or completed, set its date properties so that you can see how long it took to complete the task.

​

---

1 Question For Your Team

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed today's issue, please reply with a few words. It helps me learn what works for you and write more of 🙌 If you didn't, you can unsubscribe via the link 👇.

See you next Wednesday — Agile Arthur​

---

Stationsplein 45, Rotterdam, 3013 AK

Not getting what you need? No hard feelings. Unsubscribe from my emails.
​