Virtual Facilitation
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions delivered on screen, plus the hybrid sessions that are harder than either.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Virtual and hybridin person, virtual or hybrid
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
Virtual & hybrid
Sessions designed for the screen rather than squeezed onto it
Positive Impact facilitates virtual and online sessions for organizations across Canada and into the US. Strategic planning, leadership development, team development and change work, delivered on screen for groups spread across provinces, time zones, or just three buildings in the same city. A virtual session isn’t a diminished version of a room. It’s a different room, with one real advantage a physical one can’t match, and the section further down sets out what that is.
We won’t pretend every conversation belongs on a screen. Some need people in the same place, and we’ll say so on the first call rather than sell you the cheaper option. What we will say is that most organizations run more hybrid sessions than they should, usually by default, and hybrid is considerably harder to do well than either of the things it’s made from.
What we facilitate
What we run on screen
Each of these is redesigned for the medium rather than delivered from the same deck with the camera on. If yours isn’t listed, ask us anyway.
Strategic planning sessions
Planning run as a series of shorter working sessions rather than one long day on camera. The spacing turns out to be a feature: people go away, test an assumption against reality, and come back with better material than hour six of a single day would ever have produced.
Learn moreCOMS communication workshops
Our communication styles assessment works particularly well on screen, because the grid is a shared object everyone sees at the same size. Nobody is reading a flip chart from the back of the room.
Learn moreTeam development sessions
Trust and psychological safety work for groups that mostly meet on screen, which is now most groups. Harder than doing it in a room, and arguably more useful, because it happens in the medium the team actually works in.
Change and transition sessions
Run when a reorganization has to be explained and worked through across sites. Anonymous input carries more weight here, because a screen makes it easier to stay silent and harder for anyone to notice who did.
Leadership development programmes
Delivered as a series across weeks, with practice between sessions rather than everything compressed into one intensive. That format suits development better than a single event does, regardless of medium.
Hybrid sessions
Part in the room, part on screen. The hardest format to run well and the one most organizations reach for first. We have a firm view about how to do it, set out further down this page.
Every session we run is designed for the medium it’s delivered in. Tell us where your people are and what needs deciding, and we’ll tell you honestly what format that actually takes.
Share what you’re working onHow we facilitate
Designed for the screen, not adapted to it
There’s no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
On screen that means shorter blocks, structured turn-taking so the confident voices don’t fill every silence, written input gathered from everyone at once rather than one person at a time, and a decision log people can watch being typed. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, with the design doing the work that a physical room’s body language would otherwise do for nothing.
Get in Touch
Ways to engage
Three ways virtual sessions get used
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
90 minutes to half a day
A single working session
One question, settled. The format virtual is genuinely best at, because a focused block on screen loses very little to the medium and costs nothing in travel.
Best for: a decision that doesn’t need anyone to get on a plane.
Ask about a sessionThree to six sessions
A series across weeks
The work a full day would cover, broken into shorter blocks with time in between. People test things against reality between sessions and bring back something better than they’d have reached in one sitting.
Best for: planning and development work, where thinking time helps.
Talk about a seriesBefore and after
Virtual wrapped around one in-person day
Sessions either side of the single day everyone travels for, so the expensive day only carries what genuinely needs everyone in the same place.
Best for: distributed teams that gather once or twice a year.
Ask about the blend
The process
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Every engagement follows a similar path, from the first call to the work that carries on after the last session closes.
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Discovery
A call to understand the group, the goal, and where everyone will actually be sitting.
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Design
A session built for the medium, with the platform and tools chosen to fit it.
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Set-up
A tech check with anyone who wants one, held before the day rather than in its first ten minutes.
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Facilitation
One lead facilitator on the process, with a second pair of hands on chat and breakouts for larger groups.
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The record
Decisions, owners and dates written up and circulated within a few days.
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Follow-through
Optional sessions between the main ones to keep commitments moving.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor’s appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team leaves with
Everyone’s input, not only the confident
Written input gathered from the whole group at once, which is the one thing a screen does better than a room. The quietest person’s idea arrives at the same moment as the loudest person’s.
A decision rather than another meeting
Sessions that close with the group having chosen, instead of agreeing to pick it up next time when the same four people will say the same four things.
Remote people who actually took part
Not a call where the room talked and the screen watched. Structured so the people who aren’t in the building carry the same weight as the people who are.
Commitments with names and dates
Who owns what, by when. An unowned action item is a wish, so a name and a date get attached before the call ends.
A written record within days
Easier on screen than anywhere else, because the decision log is typed in front of everyone and agreed as it goes rather than reconstructed from somebody’s notes.
Habits your team keeps using
Most groups carry two or three structures out of a facilitated virtual session and into their own meetings. It’s the cheapest lasting thing on offer and nobody plans for it.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
Not all of these were virtual engagements and we won’t pretend otherwise. They’re the kinds of sessions we run and what groups point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
– Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
– Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President – People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
– Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
– Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
– ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
– ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
– Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you’re not fully satisfied with the results, we’ll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That’s a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchChoosing the format
Which format fits, and what each one costs you
The common mistake isn’t choosing virtual over in person. It’s choosing hybrid by default, because it looks like the option that keeps everybody happy.
| Format | What it’s good for | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Fully virtual, one block | Ninety minutes to half a day on one clear question. No travel, no venue, and a tighter agenda because nobody is justifying an airfare | Anything that needs a group to sit with discomfort for a while. Attention on camera is a real constraint and pretending otherwise helps nobody |
| Fully virtual, a series | Planning and development across three to six shorter sessions, with thinking time in between that measurably improves what comes back | Momentum, if the gaps stretch. Somebody has to hold the cadence between sessions or the series quietly becomes two sessions |
| Fully in person | The conversations where people need to read a room, and anything where trust is being rebuilt from a low base | Travel, venue, and a day of everyone’s time. Worth it for the right conversation and expensive for the wrong one |
| Hybrid, most people in one room | Very little, honestly. It’s the most common hybrid setup and the weakest one | Your remote participants, who become an audience within about half an hour. Read the section below before choosing this |
| Hybrid, everyone on their own device | A genuinely mixed group where some travel is unavoidable. It levels the room by making everyone equally remote | The in-room group’s comfort, for roughly ten minutes. After that it stops feeling strange and starts feeling obvious |
| Virtual and in-person blend | Distributed teams: virtual sessions either side of the one day everyone travels for | Coordination. Someone has to own the thread running between the pieces, and that someone can be us |
A point worth knowing
If one person is remote, the honest move is for everyone to join from their own device
Hybrid sessions fail structurally rather than technically. When most of a group shares a room, the room takes over. People make eye contact, react faster to each other, and fill silences before anyone remote has found a gap to speak into. The people on screen become an audience. Nobody intends it and it happens anyway, because physical proximity does that work whether you want it to or not.
The reported pattern is consistent across the research and the practitioner accounts. Remote participants get less speaking time, are less likely to have their ideas attributed to them in the notes afterwards, and tend to disengage somewhere around the half-hour mark. A facilitator who reads that quiet as agreement writes down a decision the group does not actually hold.
The fix is unglamorous and it works. If even one person is remote, everyone joins from their own device with their own camera and microphone, including the people sitting in the same building. It feels faintly ridiculous for about ten minutes. Then the side conversations stop, everyone is the same size on the same screen, and the chat becomes a channel the whole group uses rather than one the room has forgotten is open. We recommend this every time, and we explain the reasoning to your group at the open so it lands as a design choice rather than an arbitrary rule.
There’s also something a screen does that a physical room simply cannot. Everyone can write at once. Ask a room of twenty for their view and you hear from four people in ten minutes. Ask the same twenty on screen and you have twenty answers in ninety seconds, several from people who would never have taken the floor. We lean on that heavily, and it’s the reason we’ll occasionally suggest running a session virtually that you had assumed needed a room.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs virtually, in person, or as a hybrid, and each is redesigned for the medium rather than delivered from the same deck.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
It suits a screen particularly well. Everyone completes the eight questions at the same time, the grid appears as a shared object at the same size for all of them, and the follow-up conversation has something concrete in front of it rather than a memory of a flip chart.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization’s direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
Run virtually, we’d usually split it across three or four sessions rather than compress it into one long day on camera. Groups come back to the second session having tested something against reality, which is a quality of thinking a single sitting rarely reaches.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni’s well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what’s already working.
It transfers to a screen better than people expect, largely because the written-input structures let everyone answer the uncomfortable questions at once rather than in turn. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centred design to keep people at the centre of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For virtual work we assign one lead facilitator who runs your discovery call, designs the sessions, delivers them, and stays with you through the follow-up. For groups above about twenty-five we add a second facilitator on chat, breakouts and the people who go quiet, because one person cannot hold the process and watch the room at the same time on a screen. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts.
Before you book
Worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions most teams have before a first virtual session.
- Hybrid sessions Making mixed in-person and remote sessions work Read the guide
- The mechanics How to facilitate a meeting Read the guide
- On screen The role of active listening in facilitation Read the guide
- Distributed teams Challenges in facilitation in tech companies Read the guide
- Tools How AI tools support, rather than replace, human connection Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Virtual facilitation FAQs
Does facilitation actually work virtually?
Yes, and for some work it’s the better choice rather than the compromise. What a screen loses is the informal texture: the corridor conversation, reading a room, the pause that tells a facilitator to slow down. What it gains is that everyone can contribute in writing simultaneously, which no physical room can do. Ask twenty people in a room for their view and you hear four in ten minutes. Ask the same twenty on screen and you have twenty answers in ninety seconds.
Should we run our session hybrid?
Usually not, and if you do, run it with everyone on their own device. Hybrid with most of the group in one room is the most common setup and the weakest, because the room takes over and the remote participants become an audience within about half an hour. If travel is genuinely unavoidable for some of your group, everyone joining individually with their own camera and microphone levels it. It feels odd for ten minutes and then stops feeling odd.
How long should a virtual session be?
Ninety minutes to half a day as a single block, and less than you’d schedule in person. Beyond about three hours on camera the quality of thinking drops in a way that is visible from the facilitator’s side, so where a full day’s work is needed we’d rather split it into three or four sessions across a few weeks. That spacing is genuinely useful: people test assumptions against reality between sessions and bring back better material.
What platform do you use?
Yours, in almost every case. Zoom, Teams and Meet all work, and your people already know where the buttons are, which is worth more than any feature comparison. We bring the collaborative tools for the working parts, and we’ll tell you in advance what your group needs to be able to reach so nobody discovers a corporate firewall at ten past nine. If your organization has a constraint, tell us early and we’ll design to it.
Our team has camera fatigue. Does everyone have to be on video?
For most of the session, yes, and we’d rather explain why than insist. A facilitator reads a group constantly and a wall of initials removes that entirely, which means the design has to be more rigid to compensate. That said, the answer to camera fatigue is usually shorter sessions rather than cameras off, and we’ll build in genuine breaks and some camera-off working time rather than pretending three hours of faces is reasonable.
How do you stop the same three people doing all the talking?
Structure, mostly. Written-first rounds mean everyone commits to a view before anyone hears the most senior person’s. Chat is used deliberately as a parallel channel rather than tolerated as a distraction. Breakouts are composed on purpose rather than randomly. And on larger groups a second facilitator watches for who hasn’t spoken, because one person genuinely cannot hold the process and watch the room at the same time on a screen.
Is a virtual session cheaper?
Meaningfully, yes. There’s no travel, no venue, and no accommodation, and the facilitation itself is priced below the equivalent in-person day. The design work is the same or slightly more, because a virtual session has to be built more carefully than one where a facilitator can read the room and adjust on the spot. We’ll quote both if you’re weighing it up, and we’ll say which we think fits the conversation you’re actually having.
How far ahead should we book?
Three to four weeks is usually enough for a virtual session, which is meaningfully shorter than the six to eight we’d want for in-person work. There’s no travel to arrange and no venue to hold, so the lead time is really just discovery, design and any pre-work such as an anonymous survey. A series across several weeks needs a little more notice, mostly to find the recurring slot in everyone’s calendar.
Let’s talk about your team
Tell us what you’re working through and where your people actually are, and we’ll tell you honestly whether the conversation belongs on a screen, in a room, or split between the two.
Get in Touch
