Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Author: Bianka Nemeth

18 Free Facilitation Resources We Think You’ll Love

Facilitation is more and more recognized as a key component of work, as employers and society are faced with bigger and more complex problems and ideas. From facilitating meetings to big, multi-stakeholder strategy development workshops, the facilitator's skillset is more and more in demand. In this article, we will go through a list of the best online facilitation resources, including newsletters, podcasts, communities, and 10 free toolkits you can bookmark and read to upskill and improve your facilitation practice. When designing activities and workshops, you'll probably start by using templates and methods you are familiar with. Soon enough, you'll need to expand your range and look for facilitation methods and…

woman searching on her phone, at her desk with her laptop and some coffee

Free Online Resources for Soft Skills Training Material

What are the best free online resources for soft skills training materials? We are going to help you to answer this question below! As a trainer, educator or facilitator, you have probably experienced that good icebreakers, exercises, and energizer games are essential for an engaging and effective soft skills training. Soft skills training programs may include different topics, such as effective communication, time management, emotional intelligence, presentation skills, active listening and more. They may be short or part of a more comprehensive program. Certainly, being directed to adult learners, they must include hands-on practice and engaging activities for skill development. It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for…

a speaker explaining a theory to the audience

5 Tips To Engage your Audience During Workshops

Engaging your audience is a tough job. Nowadays, it is even tougher when our capacity for attention is lower than a goldfish’s. The digital noise around us is so high only the extremities get through. Most of us have gotten used to this “new normal”, and we expect so much more from an article, a movie or a brand to get our attention. Likewise, we expect no less from our trainers. The burden of engaging participants during a training event always falls hard on the trainer. It’s not the participants’ responsibility to get engaged immediately, it is the trainer who needs to persuade the audience. Of course, it is always…

3 Ways to Give Effective Feedback Everytime

When was the last time you felt you learned something from feedback on your performance? Or that you got useful, workable suggestions? Or that the feedback was actually more like a conversation than your superior just listing all the things you’ve done wrong? Even when feedback is mostly constructive and positive it can be stressful getting it. ...or you dread it? You are not alone. For instance, in large companies 62% of employees say that they don’t ever see changes occur from feedback they give during reviews. That’s why big companies have been eliminating reports and performance reviews. Some of this feedback frustration could come from a lack of transparency…

Psychological Safety: The key to high-performing teams

What are the ingredients of a perfect team? Do teams perform better if they socialize outside of work? Do individual educational backgrounds affect a team’s success? Do strong-handed managers make teams more effective? These are just some of the questions Google’s researches asked when they embarked upon a journey to find out how to build the perfect team in early 2012. After years of research, it turned out that it doesn't matter if team members are friends or strangers, or if they have a strong hierarchical system or not.The only thing that separated thriving and successful teams from average ones was psychological safety. Until early 2016 no one except researchers…

5 Reasons Why Team Building is Crucial (With Team Building Activities!)

In our last post about groups and teams we looked at the differences between the two notions and listed seven points that need to be fulfilled in order to form a team from a group. In this post we explore further the formation of teams with a focus on team building - a popular, though sometimes controversial, method that is usually a go-to for every organization when it comes to dealing with teams. Team building. What pictures come to mind seeing this word? A 3-day long spa treatment with occasional games? Small rooms with no air and hours-long discussions on unimportant topics? Know-it-all trainers, bored participants, mandatory activities and that…

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5 Brilliant TED talks on Team Building

There are plenty of books and studies on how to form teams from groups, which parts of team development are crucial, and how to assemble high-performing teams. However, in our busy world it becomes harder and harder to squeeze in time to sit down, open a book and read. Normally, when faced with a problem or stuck with a question, we need an instant solution or inspiration. That’s where TED talks can help us. These inspiring, engaging and motivating speeches come in an easily digestible video format. They are perfect for when you are on the go or don’t have time to dive into a book. The talks are quilted…

Gamestorming methods now in SessionLab library!

Imagine that you have been asked to lead the next meeting of your team. You know that you have one hour to help the team agree on the project’s next steps. However the last three meetings were painful, ineffective and the team did not decide on anything. So what do you do? Business meetings are supposedly strict, short, and structured. Most of the cases participants are there not because they chose to do so, but was advised to attend or had to. They are normally less engaged or eager to take part in activities, that would be typical for a workshop, feeling like they are wasting their precious time on…

The Best Online Tool to Create Workshops [Case Study]

How would you solve the challenge of designing an international train-the-trainer course with 10 trainers? And without ever being in the same room while planning the event? The organizing team of trainers needed a solution to coordinate the design of their train-the-trainer course — something that would make the process of session planning easier and more natural; something that would provide synchronized collaborative work; something that would still feel like a creative process, with Post-it notes and flipcharts, but in a digital environment. Luckily, they discovered SessionLab, a tool designed for trainers and facilitators. It enabled their remote team to work together on the planning of training session agendas and…

75 essential workshop methods from Hyper Island (now in SessionLab library)

It is our pleasure to let you know that in the SessionLab library of facilitation methods you can now find and use methods from Hyper Island Toolbox - the toolbox that was most commonly mentioned by SessionLab users in the past year. Continue reading to find out how the Toolbox grew out of the vision of lifelong learning born in a bar. Nowadays when we graduate from the university and get our diplomas there is one thing we need to face as soon as possible: our learning journey does not stop when we throw our hats into the sky. To stay relevant in the job market and at our workplaces,…

Group vs team: What’s the difference?

I remember the first time I had to do a workshop for 30 or so bright-eyed students on the subject of teamwork. I had to explain the difference between a group and a team and how to form a group into a team. Up until this particular workshop what I have known about the group concept and the team concept could have been summed up like this: “a bunch of people coming together to do something.” Sure, it is not something you would put on a flipchart and call it a definition right? After some research, I realized I wasn’t entirely wrong.. but I was not right either. There is…

Thiagi methods now in SessionLab Library!

Learning by playing a game As children, it is so natural for us to play games. During these game-times we learn a lot of things, that affects our thinking, feeling and actions. Usually, these learning-by-doing moments happen unnoticed, thus naturally. However, as we grow up we forget about the importance of this special kind of learning setting. And to be honest, not every type of game is applicable to adult life right? I mean would you really kneel down and dug a tunnel in a sandbox? Fortunately, there are many other ways to bring back some playing into our lives! One of them is to start using more games in…

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