With learning budgets still being squeezed, more and more organizations are adopting the virtual classroom as ‘business as usual’. Properly facilitated, the virtual classroom can be an engaging, comfortable and accountable learning environment – a far-cry from the passive, one-way haven multitaskers have learned to love. Here are six lessons to ensure your virtual facilitation success.

Do a different kind of homework.
The virtual classroom has a different kind of energy that requires your attention before you start.  Because participants can’t see each other and “catch” each other’s enthusiasm, it’s up to you to set a positive high energy tone from the very start. Develop a ritual to focus and energize yourself a few minutes before your session takes off.

Pull up an easy chair.
The social connecting and rapport-building that makes people comfortable in the face-to-face classroom won’t happen here without some prompting. Take the extra effort to make personal connections with and between participants. Create comfort by outlining clear expectations for how to participate and the role you will play in encouraging involvement.

Add some pop to your talk.
The energy you project will be reflected back to you by participants…good, bad or ugly. Think of your voice as your energy instrument with infinite range of tone, inflection and pace. Use your voice to make up for energy lost through the absence of body language and facial expression.

Get everyone talking.
The natural turn-taking that occurs in face-to-face discussions is compromised virtually. The visual cues are missing. Open questions directed to the whole group may generate silence not because participants are disinterested but because they are waiting for someone else to take his or her turn. Let people know how you want them to respond and call on people by name generously.

Dish out the details.
When participants are confused about what they are to do in the virtual world, you can’t walk over casually to clarify. Clear, specific directions are even more critical in this venue – with visual support through slides and ‘print-your-own’ style handouts.

Fend off awkward moments.
Awkward moments – like consistent latecomers, off-base comments or negativity – magnify in the virtual classroom. Work diligently to keep things focused and to turn glimpses of negativity into positive problem solving. Minimize attention to latecomers – why take valuable time from those who arrived on time? Try even a few of these virtual virtuoso lessons and enjoy the beautiful learning you and your participants will create together.

Written by DesignArounds, your one-stop learning and development partner. © 2010. For more information about DesignArounds’ products & services, visit us at www.designarounds.com.

Need more help in this area? Our program, The Invisible Meeting, offers additional tips for achieving success in the “virtual world”. It illustrates six techniques that that turn a conference call into a productive, collaborative group session.

Organizations have been through a lot these past few years.  A certain amount of fatigue/disenchantment/frustration is normal. BUT, left unaddressed, these things can multiply and create a widespread epidemic of negativity.  The Negativity Self-Evaluation tool below can help assess where attitudes might be slipping towards the negative.  The debriefing information that follows provides steps for formulating an Attitude Adjustment Action Plan.

Negativity Self-Evaluation

Where do you rate on the negativity scale? Score yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 for each question, and try to be honest with your answers.

   1                     2                        3                           4                          5
Never             Seldom             Sometimes                 Often                    Always
                                                                                                                                                                                                   

1. Do you come into your workplace feeling enthusiastic and confident?                 _____
2. Do you focus on your goals even when you’re having a bad day?                        _____
3. Do you look for positive solutions when things don’t go your way at work?          _____
4. Do you set a good example for co-workers?                                                     _____
5. Do you communicate well with your colleagues?                                               _____
6. Do co-workers feel they can come to you for help?                                            _____
7. Are you satisfied with the quality of work you do?                                              _____
8. Do you find healthy ways to relieve stress?                                                       _____
9. Do you collaborate with others to meet the team’s and your goals?                     _____
10. Are you open to changes in your routine or environment?                                  _____
                                                                                                                Total  _____

Scoring
If your total is under 25, you are highly susceptible to negativity and may be affecting others with your attitude.  Continue to evaluate your performance on the job.  If you can’t break the pattern of negativity, ask for outside help from a supervisor, a friend or Human Resources.

If your total is between 25-35, you’re on the borderline; you can fall victim to negativity, particularly during stressful times.  When feeling pressured, give yourself a negativity “spot check”.  Ask yourself if your work is up to par, if you are snapping easily, or whether your co-workers are acting differently towards you.  These could all be signs that you need to take a deep breath and re-evaluate your attitude.

If your total is over 35, you probably don’t succumb to negativity often.  But, you may not be completely immune to it.  Think about how you interact with colleagues, especially when you’re stressed. People probably look to you as a model for positive behavior, so make sure stress doesn’t get the best of you.  And, if you see others inciting a climate of negativity, try to help the person(s) find a positive solution or encourage them to seek assistance.

Debrief – The Attitude Adjustment Plan
Here are several good steps to take whenever you feel yourself becoming negative. (If you’re a manager or co-worker who needs to point out negativity in another person, see the special Note at the bottom.)

Take responsibility for your attitude and acknowledge the difficulties your negativity is causing.
Without an honest acceptance of the responsibility for and impact of your attitude, there is no motivation to change.  

Practice “responding” rather than “reacting” to situations.
A reaction is often an instinctive, unproductive way of dealing with difficulties (negative people often “react” by blaming others for problems without seeing the part they’ve played in creating the problem).  On the other hand, a response requires thoughtful consideration of:
      - how can I take control of the situation vs. being a victim of the situation?
      - what productive strategies and actions can I take?

Attempt to identify underlying causes for the negative attitude.
Try to uncover some of the reasons behind what you’re feeling. Is there a higher amount of stress than usual in the workplace?  Are there unresolved issues with co-workers?  Have you been feeling undervalued or overworked? Could family problems, debt, or illness be a factor? 

Address the situations that cause stress.
Once you see what is causing the problem, try to find a workable solution and look for ways to prevent similar situations in the future. If need be, talk it over with another person.  It’s amazing how an outside perspective can shed light on things.  If there are conflicts you don’t feel comfortable handling on your own, ask a supervisor or HR person for assistance.

Note:  If you are in a position of pointing out another person’s attitude problem, make sure you do these things in addition to suggesting the actions listed above:
     - discuss the problem in private
     - begin by giving positive feedback
     - handle emotionally charged subjects with sensitivity
     - focus on performance, not personality

Based on material in the Leader’s Guide for The Attitude Virus: Curing Negativity in the Workplace.
© CRM Learning.

Need help in this area? Bad attitudes in the workplace can spread like a virus and infect everyone in the whole organization. With CRM’s The Attitude Virus program, help employees learn to spot unproductive attitudes in themselves and others, and counteract them with positive behavior.

IMPORTANT:

• • This activity runs more smoothly if you prepare a Summary Sheet in advance, preferably on a flipchart page or a whiteboard. See below for an example.
• • You will need help displaying the results of this activity. Identify a participant in advance who can help you quickly, accurately and legibly tabulate the responses on the flipchart sheet that you have prepared.

Introduce Activity/Give Instructions

Pass out the Handout and Scoring Sheet to each participant.

REVIEW the instructions on the Handout, and explain that their opinions—the way they label the behaviors— will be anonymously collected, summarized and then discussed with the group.

The Handout asks what category each of 20 behaviors belongs to:
Clearly ethical, clearly unethical, or some shade of gray.

ALLOW participants 5 – 6 minutes to work through the list and categorize each of the behaviors as E, L, M, D, or U.

Once participants have finished filling out the Handout, direct them to summarize their own results on the Scoring Sheet.  Participants should not write their names on this scoring sheet when they turn it in to the facilitator.

ALSO MAKE SURE participants understand that they are to list the actual numbers of the items in the boxes, rather than a count of how many items they labeled in each category.  (This makes it possible to tabulate the responses.)

Sample Summary Sheet: Flipchart/Whiteboard

In advance of the session or while participants are working on their Handouts, prepare your whiteboard or flipchart page to display a summary of the data.

Directions: Set up a flipchart sheet or whiteboard as shown below (this table has been shortened to save space). Summarize the participants’ responses (from their Scoring Sheets) by placing tally (or hatch) marks in the table below.  Tally marks will enable the group to see the patterns of the responses.

Item	E	L	M	D	U
1
2
20

Polling Activity Debrief

Collect all Scoring Sheets and summarize them on your whiteboard or flipchart. When the participants’ individual tallies have been recorded for all to see, proceed with the debrief.

ASK:

• • What makes categorizing some of the behaviors difficult?  Which items were difficult to categorize?
• • Can a behavior be “slightly unethical?” or “Close, but not quite unethical?”
• • What criteria did you use to categorize your choices?  In other words, as you grouped the behaviors on the list, what were your choices based on?

               Possible examples of criteria:

•            • Would the violation be discovered?
•            • Were people emotionally affected?
•            • Were significant dollars involved?
•            • Would this behavior physically harm anyone?
• • Do you think people consider impacts or consequences when they are making their choices about ethical issues?  Which impacts make the most difference?

Discuss the results displayed on the flipchart summary. Look for certain item numbers.  Were most of the behaviors listed as E or U, or were many more listed in the gray columns?  ASK participants what patterns stand out for them.

POINT OUT items (behaviors) that have the widest range of responses.  Have the group discuss why these items might have received the range of responses they did.

SUGGEST that a possible explanation for items having a range of responses (tally marks in several categories) or items where a large number of responses labeled the behavior as M is that the organization’s policies and guidance on these behaviors might not be clear enough.

As time permits, discuss other patterns participants see in the responses. It’s likely that very rich discussions will occur around the issues raised by this exercise.    

MAKE ONE OR MORE OF THESE KEY POINTS:

• • As we gain experience in the workplace, we tend to see things less often in terms of black and white.  Where we draw the line between right and wrong tends to become a bit blurry.
• • When right and wrong become blurry — when we are operating in the gray zone — we should fall back on the guidance of our experience, or the guidance of rules, procedures, and laws for direction.
• • It’s not possible for organizations to guide every specific behavior, or to have a rule or regulation to cover every situation. That’s why it comes down to the individual and to his or her choices.
• • Employees need to understand the intent of the organization’s code of conduct, and have an understanding of its values (and for the organization to have clear values).

Handout: Ethical Polling

Directions: What category does each of the behaviors on the list belong to?

Polling Scoring Sheet

Directions: Write the numbers of the items on the Handout that fall into each of the following categories. For example, if you marked items 4, 7 and 12 as E (Ethical), write 4, 7, 12 in the large box on the E (Ethical) row.  Do the same for each category (E, L, M, D, U).

 Please hand this form to the workshop leader after recording your responses.
Do not write your name on the form.
 

This activity is excerpted from the Leader’s Guide for the video training program Ethics 4 Everyone.

Need more help in this area? Ethics 4 Everyone provides a powerful ethics overview for any type of organization. In just 15 minutes, viewers see why focusing on ethics is key to organizational and individual success. They are also given an ethical action test, tips for solving ethical dilemmas, and more.