My experience of facilitating a remote workshop with breakout rooms
Breakout rooms were useful as a way of splitting into groups on a video call to have separate discussions and then coming back together to playback learnings.
Let’s start by rewinding to a time when I was working in an office 5 days a week. I frequently facilitated in-person workshops and splitting people into small groups was something I did a lot:
- Divide everyone into small groups scattered around the room (3–4 people)
- Give them a topic or problem to work as a team
- Each team plays back a summary and key points to the whole room
It worked really well for getting through topics quickly and efficiently.
When I moved to working remotely in March 2020 due to the pandemic, this was not something that was easy to replicate. I found that remote discussions were slower and more rigid. When there’s more than about 5 people on a call, it can result in either total chaos or a few people dominating the discussion. Zoom breakout rooms helped bridge the gap. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams also have breakout room features.
I tried this recently for a design workshop and got a surprising amount done in an hour with 10 people.
Start together — align and brainstorm (20 min)
We started the call as one big group of 10 people. We discussed the goal for the workshop to set expectations and then brainstormed problems that we’d be focusing this workshop on. For the brainstorming, we use the digital whiteboard tool, Miro. After grouping the brainstorm output into themes, we were ready to split.
Split into groups (30 min)
I chose the members of each group to keep it simple and created the breakout rooms in Zoom. Everyone disappeared from the main room into their rooms. It was weird, for a moment, suddenly being the only person left in the main room. As the host, I dropped into the different rooms to check how things were going, kind of like floating around the room to each group when working in a physical space.
I noticed that splitting into groups created a sense of team for each group and focused them on the solving the problem at hand.
Come back together (10 min)
After 30 mins, we came back into the main room as one big group. Each team played back the problem they chose and the ideas they had come up with. The ideas were fantastic and there were loads of them, some really well thought through solutions. This session was the start of a 6-week sprint for these problem areas and everyone felt focused and energised on what they needed to do.
Reflection
Afterwards, it struck me how productive the workshop was, which was something I hadn’t felt very often in remote meetings. I think breaking out into smaller groups worked really well for making progress in a short amount of time. On reflection, there were a few things that helped it work well:
- Align on an agenda and expectations at the start — everyone had a clear idea of what we were using the time for and what we wanted to achieve (I was skeptical we would get through everything)
- Create the content together — this is part of the alignment piece, but having everyone contribute at the beginning ensures people understand the content. In this case it was a list of problem areas everyone brainstormed.
- Give the teams a clear task / goal — it’s important to have simple and clear instructions for the teams. In this case it was “in 30 min, brainstorm ideas on your chosen problem and choose one idea”
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