Anda's blog

I ran my first workshop! (and it went well)

Last week I facilitated a workshop! I never thought I would do a workshop for fun, but here we are.

Why did I do it?

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In a professional setting, I'm passionate about a few things - gender equity, accessibility, clear communication. I managed to combine all of these in a one hour workshop dedicated to brainstorm ideas for our engineering blog at FreeAgent, Grinding gears!

I wrote on the blog myself a couple of times:

And obviously there's this blog too, so I'm pretty confident I enjoy writing!

But, I noticed a lot of the posts on the FreeAgent blog didn't come from members of our gender minorities in engineering group. And I want to change that. I want people to feel more confident in writing, and I want the world to hear what they have to say, because they have some really amazing ideas!

How did I do it?

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Firstly, I wanted to understand the barriers that people in the gender minorities group face around writing on the blog, so I ran a small survey.

The results were interesting: the majority of people said they don't know what to write about, and a couple of people said they do have ideas but are lacking confidence.

Armed with this knowledge, I started to make a plan. I knew the biggest issue was lack of ideas or inspiration for what to write, so I would focus the workshop on brainstorming for ideas.

Goals

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For me, the goals of this session were to:

I think a lot of us in a minority group lack confidence, especially around having a voice or an opinion. I struggle with this every day, so it's understandable. I also think it's important to hear from a diverse set of voices, and this was my way to help achieve it.

The plan

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The workshop was one hour long and was open to the whole engineering department, but we encouraged participation from the gender minorities group in particular.

I planned a series of brainstorming exercises to help them find out what topics they might want to write about. We would also spend some time researching whether the topics had been written about before and see what angle they wanted to pursue. Finally, to give people something tangible to work with after the session, we would write a short post outline which can be used for a full-fledged post later.

In between the exercises, we would have discussions around people's ideas to increase their confidence in their proposed topics.

Years ago, I read the book "The developer's guide to content creation" by Stephanie Morillo. I found the book very useful and full of practical tips, and it inspired me to put some of the advice in practice.

Feedback

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I used feedback from a few people to inform the format of the session:

So, how did it go?!

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It went really, really well!

First of all, 15 people signed up, the majority from the gender minorities group which is what I was hoping for!

We had half of the participants in the office, and half joining remotely. So I had to make sure the conversation was not excluding people online. Even though I was in the office, I had to ensure everyone's ideas were heard. When presenting the schedule and doing any sort of talking, I made sure to talk to the camera loudly and clearly so people online could hear well.

I was prepared that the timings of the exercises could shift depending on how much people wanted to share. I had planned for a shorter first exercise, however people were quite keen to discuss things so I shortened the brainstorming time of another exercise slightly to accommodate that. I wanted to prioritise open discussion and feedback over some activities that people could potentially do on their own afterwards. In the end, I managed to get us finished on time (which was quite important as it was lunch time and I didn't want anyone to go hungry).

There were a lot of amazing ideas being presented, and I am hopeful that people felt supported to pursue them. A theme that came up was the pressure people felt to write more deeply technical posts to "prove" that they're just as competent as their male peers. We challenged that, and argued that the "softer" (hate that term) topics are just as valuable, if not more valuable as they're not written about enough.

We also had snacks!

What's next?

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I'd like to keep the conversation going and gently nudge people to keep developing their post after the session, so I'm planning an informal get together soon with whoever is interested to share how they're getting on.

I received a lot of really good feedback after the session, which was really great to see. I had a great time running the workshop and I would do it again!