In this discussion, Christopher Parsons, Laura, and another participant explore how to design virtual training that fosters connection and culture across a geographically dispersed AEC firm. They highlight the value of breakout rooms for creating informal, peer‑to‑peer interactions that let staff share recent project experiences, discover resources, and build relationships beyond annual town‑hall meetings. The conversation also addresses practical concerns such as the fast pace of video content, the need to keep learners engaged, and the balance between pre‑recorded video and live instruction. They note that assigning leadership roles to less‑experienced staff in small groups can boost confidence and develop future leaders. The team emphasizes signaling the importance of training through a live‑virtual kickoff that reflects the firm’s identity (the “Lionakis way”), using varied instructional cadences and cues to maintain attention. Overall, the group reflects on iterative improvements to the training design, aiming to make virtual learning more interactive, culturally resonant, and effective for cross‑office collaboration.
Chapters
And I think the win from what I'm imagining and having talked through this with you guys a couple of times before, is from a learner that feels like a way more engaging format than being lectured at. And I get to meet new people in the breakout and we get to have it be interactive. And I would guess that that hour kind of flew by in a way that it wouldn't have.
So fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
For us, too fast.
Yeah, yeah.
I think when you're in a big firm that started as family, right, a smaller firm, and we all grew up in that kind of environment, you continuously struggle with how am I going to transfer culture, meet people, talk to people as human beings, not as a team's message. And those breakout rooms, they sound like a small thing, but they are ways that somebody can say, oh, I did this on a recent project. Let me walk us through this cartoon tuning piece in our breakout room, and suddenly someone from our San Diego office or San Francisco office is like, ah, I have a new resource. They seem to know what they were doing. They may not have ever met that person other than our once-a-year town hall event, and certainly not in an arena where their experience or expertise would necessarily shine through. So, you know, any way we can break the the firm down into smaller groups to, to talk, I think is valuable. And when you have this thing, this practice in common to talk about, it really opens the conversation real quickly.
Yeah, I think the little side effect too is that you worry about the multitasking with training being virtual and people in different places and the expectation that this new format I'm going to join and there's going to be some breakout rooms. I'm going to need to do something. People kind of perk up a little bit more.
Like, so this video is going to go by fast and then you're going to be in a room with your peers expected to have like—
to have listened to it.
Yeah.
That's a totally different experience.
I mentioned to you the other day that I went into a breakout room and the group kind of went like, oh no. How much longer do I get her in my breakout room?
Laura, I think you told me that the instruction to the breakout room was to have the least experienced people speak first.
Yeah.
Right.
And I didn't say a word.
Yeah.
You know, I just kind of, who's going to be in charge? And one of our younger staff took charge. He ran the, you know, we had to pull up the exercise. We had to do some markups and he ran the whole thing and the rest of us kind of chatted at him while he was doing that. And it was really, really effective. And I think he felt really good about it too.
Yeah.
That he was able to be a leader in that small small room.
There's so many things I love about this design that you all have come up with, and I know you're gonna iterate on it. You already have things you want to do a little differently next time. Maybe, maybe we can touch on that. But I wanna call attention to, you know, when people hear about using an LMS and having, you know, kind of video-based training, one of the objections is, aren't we gonna talk? We're not gonna talk to each other anymore. That's how people understand and learn from each other. No one wants to sit around and just watch a wall of videos all day, which I agree with. But what's also true, I think, is not all video is created equal. And, and sometimes you can do really hyper-efficient ones, but not all live sessions are great either. And so it seems like you're trying to figure out how to use video, what it's best for, and how to use live interaction for what it's best for.
And Christina brought this up at the very beginning, and I think it's a really important part of our— I'll call it evolution, but the big training and then the smaller trainings that follow it is the big training to us and the dedicating the hour and starting it off is saying this is important content. We expect you to be here and present and paying attention and all the little tricks Christina said, like, oops, I'm going into an exercise, I better pay attention, help. But we thought it was important to have that first training live virtual kind of with a cadence of different kinds of instruction to say this is important stuff. And if you're going to be at Lionakis, we're going to do it the Lionakis way.
