Workshops are serious business — they tackle meaty material and move at a brisk pace, so it’s key to keep your team dialed in and following along. That was challenging enough for in-person workshops. For remote workshops, it can feel herculean. But great news — here are some creative ideas, tips, and techniques for grabbing and keeping your team’s attention from afar. Contributing Writer at Miro John Cockrell covers topics for Miro on all things remote collaboration.

For over 50 years, the team at frog has harnessed the power of in-person collaboration to help their clients bring new products to market and transform their businesses. Their process and the incredible outcomes they produce have earned them a reputation for excellence. There’s a reason brands like Porsche, GE, and Pfizer turn to Frog to inject new levels of innovation into their product design.

The shift to remote work has disrupted many traditional organizational processes and company cultures. Too many of our day-to-day activities are quite challenging to replicate virtually. Now, shoulder tapping and meetings have become even more of a burden, and it seems more difficult to keep employees feeling happy, appreciated, and engaged with their work and colleagues. The struggle is real.

The shift to remote work has disrupted many traditional organizational processes and company cultures. Too many of our day-to-day activities are quite challenging to replicate virtually. Now, shoulder tapping and meetings have become even more of a burden, and it seems more difficult to keep employees feeling happy, appreciated, and engaged with their work and colleagues. The struggle is real.

As of mid-March, 12 months have officially passed since hundreds of millions of people around the world began working remotely to help slow the spread of the newly emerging coronavirus. What many of us thought might be a month or so of “flattening the curve” has now been a full year of working from our homes, with far-reaching effects on our relationships, processes, and work habits.

Everyone has their own tried-and-true methods to jumpstart creativity. For many, the process involves physically writing down ideas on Post-it® Notes and then huddling around the whiteboard to flesh them out with colleagues. But as remote and distributed work environments become the norm, teams need a new way to ideate and collaborate online while still allowing for independent exploration with pen and paper.

Oh, the blank canvas. While the freedom of a blank slate may be a breath of fresh air for the new year, when you’re in a bit of a bind it can be overwhelming. You can end up spending hours searching for that creative spark and setting everything up just the way you like it from scratch—or you can tap into one of our templates to get the ideas flowing. When we started building templates for the first time, we wanted to give users the quickest of starts.

You know that engagement is the secret sauce for any virtual meeting or workshop. But, it’s tough to get people to stay focused—let alone actively participate. A recent survey found that more than half of workers admit they do other things (like check email or peruse social media) during online meetings. This is where workshop activities come in handy.

“Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you – they might have different tastes.” — George Bernard Shaw When it was time to look back and reflect on my three-month onboarding period at Miro, I was convinced that I’ve never been part of such a collaborative, open team culture. Curiously enough, I’ve never met anyone from my team (or company) in person.

Since the dawn of time—when humans were still living in caves—we’ve been solving life’s problems through innovation. Back then, we invented fire and hunting spears. Today, we create things like portable toasters and wireless headphone translators to meet our needs. As a product designer, I’ve learned that great design comes down to one important thing: listening. I practice the principles of design thinking to solve problems in a human-centric way.