We're offering a new service - guidance and support for your work online.
When the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown started in the UK, most of us needed to get to grips with working online. Instead of a human being in the room with us, we and our clients have become two-dimensional faces in small boxes on a screen.
For those of us who teach, train and coach, this has meant a major change to how we need to operate. It means that many, even most, of the ‘knowns’ we are used to in our work have become unknowns. This is, at best, disconcerting and at worst can be distressing and stressful.
How we responded
Result CIC had to handle its own steep learning curve when our work went online with only a little warning. We experienced several of the feelings and insecurities which are typical of facing a sudden change.
Our approach was to undertake CPD (Continuous Professional Development), share ideas from this immediately, develop them and to run our own ‘action learning sets’ in the form of small Zoom and other meetings designed to experiment with what was possible. We realised quickly that ‘doing it’ was the best way to understand, and check, how these systems work. FAQs just didn’t cut the mustard!
What emerged from this intensive learning was the realisation that for online interactive working, you need a completely different starting point. It’s not ‘What will we do’, it’s asking ‘What can we do?’ first, then building content into these effective methods. And offline material becomes so much more important too.
How it worked
This development work took time and involved some occasionally painful adaptations. Jane – who is deaf – memorably co-facilitated a full-day workshop with Hormoz which, due to bandwidth problems, had to be carried out with several participants using audio only. When one of the participants later asked her how this had made her feel, she said ‘terrified at the start!’.
This experience highlighted important areas such as trust (of her fantastic lipspeakers) and vulnerability (a strength when appropriately shared) – issues from our programme content in fact! But it also pushed us to explore a range of platforms for online interactive work and experiment with what was possible.
We gradually gained confidence with this new way of working. We are proud of positive feedback received after two recent online workshops:
"This was the best session yet – really appreciated the pace, the fascinating subject matter and the smaller breakout groups meant productive discussions plus good networking opportunities."
‘‘The pace was really good. I loved the breakouts. Snappy and focused. And I liked the breaks – breaking up the day well.’"
Now we are in a position to take our own experience and share our learning with other people and organisations having to adapt to new ways of working.
Interested?
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