[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Hi there,
last week’s post had a co-located perspective. But nowadays, a lot of meetings, retros included, are remote. I’ve mostly facilitated via videocall, ever since Covid hit. At my workplace, we switched to everyone working from home virtually overnight and all my retros were suddenly virtual. The good news is, most things translate well into online retros.
For a long time, I had assumed that almost every activity could be adapted to work remotely and ever since creating the Retromat Miroboard Mega Template, I’m sure: Out of 146 activities, only 16 do not easily translate into a remote context.
Apart from adapting the activities, there are other things that are notably different in a remote setting:
- Easier to prep for, harder to run
I find it easier to prepare for remote retros: No need to book a room, make sure that the markers work, clean boards or other physical prep work. And ever since I built the Miro Templates, I’ve gotten really fast at prepping for a remote retro.
During the retro, I find it harder remotely, mostly because of the tech hiccups that inevitably happen, like people suddenly dropping from the call. - Harder to stay focused
Maybe that’s just a me-problem but I find it much harder to stay focussed in a remote setting, especially when I am waiting for others to finish a silent round of writing. In a co-located retro, there is nothing else for me to do but be present. Remotely, everything else I could be doing is just one browser tab away.
And concentration in general is harder to keep up when all you do is stare at a screen. I try to have a break roughly every 60 minutes (compared to every 80 minutes for a co-located setting). - Body language and positioning
These are missing in a digital context. - There is no implicit rotation
If you are all in one physical space, sitting in a circle, participants can take turns in round-robin activities very easily. That’s much harder in digital settings and often leads to wasted time, while everyone is unsure who’s supposed to speak next. Some ways to solve this:- Have a virtual circle of the team members on a board
- Use the list of participants in your video call tool, if it’s stable and the same for everyone
(I’d love to use this but we use Google Meet which for each participant omits their own name in the list. Makes it very easy to be unsure about when it’s your own turn) - Ask participants to pick the next person at the end of their own turn
(I mainly use this one, but honestly, with mixed results. People frequently forget to name the next person.) - Use the “raise hand” feature of your videocall tool
(We use that feature all the time in free discussions but not when going around in circle, when I’d ideally want everyone to speak once.)
- Anonymity is harder to achieve
If you want to run an activity with anonymous input, you need to put in more thought beforehand
It’s very likely that there are things missing here
If I can, I avoid hybrid settings. My retros are either co-located or everyone is on the call independently. In my experience, in hybrid there’s a good chance that the sound is crap and there’s always someone out of the video frame. Plus, the co-located people tend to forget about the remote people. That being said, tech has actually gotten better in recent years, with mics and cameras that can focus on the speaker and it’s not a total pain anymore. But bad audio is incredibly exhausting and if I don’t have to, I don’t want to potentially waste my participants’ mental resources.
Take a minute:
Which mode do you prefer, remote or in-person? How do you solve the round-robin turn-taking in remote settings?
Okay, that’s that then! On to the “during” part of retros next week 🙂
Cheers, Corinna
PS: I’ve only mentioned digital boards like Miro, Mural, Conceptboard etc. There’s always other ways to do it. I’ve used easyretro.io and heard of shared Google Docs, shared Powerpoint decks and so on. As long as you can all edit and are all referring to the same source, try out what works best for you out of the tools that are available.
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books