Whether you meet in person or remotely for your branding workshop will likely be dictated by circumstance rather than preference. Fret not. Whether you’re a radical remote-async advocate, meet your team face to face every day, or anything in between, the framework in this book works just as well over Zoom as it does in the meeting room. In this chapter, I want to talk to you about the pros and cons, as well as share tips, tools, and resources for three possible approaches: in-person, remote (synchronously), and remote (asynchronously). By the end of it, if you have the luxury to do so, you’ll be able to choose the approach that’s likely to work best with your team, or you’ll be more prepared for the challenges that the one method available to your team presents.
There are four main things to keep in mind when evaluating the three approaches:
Ease: How easy it is to manage the collaborative process, including the level of organization required, facilitation challenges, and logistics, like coordinating schedules, using tools, and dealing with technical issues.
Fun: How enjoyable and interactive the experience is for the team. This may vary widely across team cultures, but I’ll make some safe assumptions to help you avoid common pitfalls. Fun and engagement enhance creativity and increase motivation, making the process more dynamic and energizing. The kind of interaction the three approaches enable can greatly affect how fun and engaging the process feels and the end product as a result.
Cost: Cost includes direct and indirect expenses associated with the collaboration approach. Costs include things like travel, venue rental, software, and people’s time.
Time: Time represents how long it takes to manage and complete the collaboration process. This includes both the time spent in meetings or working sessions and the time it takes to gather feedback and make decisions.
The table below shows my rating of each method on the four parameters we just discussed:
Meetings are expensive. Executive-level meetings are even more expensive. Ten people meeting for an hour is a ten-hour meeting. You do the math. However, the energy and connection enabled by real-time collaboration, especially in-person, is hard or even impossible to replicate any other way. Teams with a well-developed remote-async culture will surely be able to pull off a profitable asynchronous branding workshop. Still, for everyone else, I suggest eating the costs and meeting real time.
Let’s now have a closer look at the three approaches one by one:
In-person
Meet in person if you can. That’s a no-brainer if your team works under the same roof, but if that should require flying people in from the other side of the world, consider if it will be worth it. Flying is expensive and time-consuming, and nobody likes it, especially the environment. Still, if you have deep pockets and play your cards right, the branding workshop might be a great opportunity to bring the team together for an annual gathering for the books.
Workshopping in-person requires the core team and the final decision maker to be in the room throughout, as well as the work involved in finding, in some cases renting, preparing, and supplying the meeting space. We’ve already ascertained this would be an expensive meeting, which makes it riskier not to work with a skilled facilitator, but if you trust your team and come prepared, you’ll make it work.
Tools:
Snacks
Whiteboard
Sharpies
Sticky notes (a lot of)
Physical countdown timer (nice to have)
Snacks
Remote (Sync)
If, when I die, I go to hell, the devil will have me spend the rest of eternity trying to read the non-verbal cues of someone I’m talking to through a single three-inch rectangle in an endless grid of identical three-inch rectangles, each containing a different person, all while I’m constantly distracted by how stupid my hair looks.
Do not let this be the fifth colorful block on your team’s Friday calendar schedule. You’ll be starting on the wrong foot, and the facilitator will then have to deal with a crowd already half-asleep while wrestling with real-time collaboration software he may have never used before. Not nice.
Share the workshop agenda in advance and try to schedule the branding exercises so your team can show up fresh and energized, have time to prime their brains before each session, and reflect on them afterward. What you want to avoid is for anyone to feel like you’re simply checking boxes. Feel free to do the full workshop in one day or break up the exercises over the course of a few days to accommodate everyone’s schedule.
A remote meeting offers the same challenges and costs as an in-person meeting while adding new software, unreliable internet, and time zones into the mix. The quasi-total absence of verbal cues, an additional layer of difficulty for the facilitator, tops it off. However, I’ve found that people always show up to branding workshops with enthusiasm and goodwill, compensating for all the compromises multiple times over.
Tools:
Your favorite video conferencing software.
Remote live collaboration software. Use mainly for its digital whiteboard feature. Collaborating live in an app is optional and a double-edged sword. It can either make things more fun or more confusing and distracting as people wrestle with unusual features or have too much fun moving things around. Miro, Mural, and FigJam are some famous apps in this category. They all do the same things. No need to overthink it. Make sure the facilitator gets familiar with the tool before the workshop.
Remote (Async)
Remote async collaboration is your most flexible and cost-effective option, allowing team members to contribute at their own pace across different time zones. It’s easier to manage since it doesn’t require live facilitation. This comes with drawbacks—nothing to worry about if you have a seasoned remote work culture.
Async branding workshops take comparatively longer and will likely last multiple days to give everyone a chance to contribute at the time that works best for them. The same rules of remote sync workshops apply: have a clear agenda and communicate it in advance. It’s even more crucial for the team to understand the strategic value of the branding workshop and to properly brief everyone before each session so that the next steps are always clarified afterward. Otherwise, the project risks losing momentum and becoming the nth task on your team’s to-do list.
Working asynchronously may also lack the immediate energy and engagement of live meetings. Without live facilitation, misunderstandings can lead to delays as people seek clarification, and disagreements often require additional rounds of back-and-forth to resolve.
Also, consider that since participants can’t defend or clarify their points in real-time, they’re effectively giving up some control over how their ideas are conveyed and interpreted. This places extra responsibility on the facilitator, who must ensure that everyone’s contribution is fairly represented without the benefit of instant feedback.
Tools:
Your favorite video conferencing software.
Remote live collaboration software. In this case, everyone will need to use the app you chose in order to contribute to the workshop, but since everyone is working on their own time, the software is much less likely to get in the way of productivity. The facilitator should check in regularly to keep things tidy on the digital whiteboard and communicate with team members in case any ideas need clarification.