We Facilitate: 20 facilitation tips to help you be a better facilitator

We’re not stressed about all the work that’s NOT getting done while we listen to Marge from accounting talking about changes in accrual policy. They are a distraction and will prevent everyone from focusing on why they are there. Request in advance that all attendees either leave phones at desks or minimally turn the ringers off and don’t pick them up during the meeting. As the boss, you wear a lot of hats and have your hands in a lot of different aspects of the business. A successful boss is one who works ON the business and isn’t always IN the business.

E.L.M.O stands for “Enough, let’s move on” and can be established as a meeting rule to cut unnecessary discussions. Once stated, anyone in the meeting can say “ELMO!” at any time to indicate that it is time to move on to the next topic. Ethical treatment of participants has a long and sometimes dark history in the behavioral sciences. We’ve come a long way since Zimbardo’s prison; as the facilitator, you need to consider the rights of the participants.

team building activities to bring your team together (and have fun!)

Under his leadership, local managers are given a free hand, meaning that the Upper West Side store may offer a shopping experience quite different from the one in Spanish Fort, Ala. The racetrack’s designers did not understand books, in Ms. Flanigan’s estimation. “You need to love books, and you need to know how our customers shop for books,” she said. Since he embarked on the Barnes & Noble redesign in 2020, Mr. Daunt has demonstrated that consistency doesn’t rank very high on his priority list.

Remember how knowing your goal was one of the key principles of facilitation? By being outcome oriented, facilitation helps teams deliver results and do meaningful work. In practice, facilitators help groups focus on what is important and reach the goal of a session efficiently and on-time.

Best Meeting Ground Rules for Facilitators You Should Know

When a task gets completed, they can check it off and it gets archived. Make the agenda specific for this group, keep it focused and a reasonable length for the allotted time. In general, the smaller the group, the more effective and productive your meeting. In those cases, I do think some sort of physical and mental break is a good thing, so a 5-minute stretch break, or have the coffee and snacks in an adjacent room, and have a set (and short) time slot dedicated to that. Sure you can amp it up by having prizes or contests, but in a way, those are just gimmicks and aren’t really part of the overall purpose of the meeting. Yes, they get people excited, but they would probably be more excited about not wasting any more of their time than absolutely necessary.

This could be in the form of a short email, or if you routinely email the agenda topics out before the meeting, make sure it’s clear what will be discussed. A difficult meeting could be one with a contentious topic such as cutting back on overtime or a change in the break policy, or the loss of some aspect of the benefits package. These were mandatory meetings of all store personnel and most of the time were held in the early morning hours. The meetings that occurred outside my own stores often allowed me to see and visit with folks I didn’t get to see every day. If you consider the goal and how many get executed, you can see why in most cases, meetings are horribly inefficient.

Engage with the community

Take a break to calm down if you feel nervous or are losing control. Watch that you’re not repeating yourself, saying “ah” between each word, or speaking too fast. (Are you standing too close to folks so they feel intimidated, making eye contact so people feel engaged?) How you act makes an impact on how participants feel. Groups have a tendency to wander far from the original agenda, sometimes without knowing it. When you hear the discussion wandering off, bring it to the group’s attention.

• But you can also decide to share the burden of facilitation with the group, for example by assigning another person to be the timekeeper.
• It also means dealing with the unfortunately occasional, uncooperative or distracted participant and keeping participants focused on the task.
• Once I honed this skill, though, there have been many facilitation projects I have turned down.
• This is the aspect of facilitation that includes moderation or “directing traffic” skills and these can have a massive impact on a team’s performance during a session.
• Those capable of expert facilitation are skilled in researching, understanding, and predicting complicated group needs and leading experiences that satisfy them.

In practice, this includes basic tasks such as considering room setup and when to take breaks. Once you are actually in the room (virtual or otherwise) with participants, this focus on being in service to the group translates into paying closing attention to group dynamics and how people are feeling. As a facilitator, being able to adapt on the fly is an essential skill, and it is also necessary to communicate and confirm the potential changes to the agenda with the group. At the end of the day, as a facilitator, you are helping a group achieve the common and agreed-upon objectives they want. So, if there are any changes in the desired outcomes, they should be agreed upon by the group. Having an extra person as a sounding board allows you to check in with one another, see if you have noticed similar patterns and needs, and ideate changes together.

When to use a facilitative approach?

World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.

When you and your team build good habits around your meetings and workshop, great things happen. Not only can a facilitative approach help improve a specific session, but it can also help bring about positive culture change agile team facilitation and improve how an organization works together. I’ve found this principle one of the most impactful in my personal practice, particularly when it comes to using a facilitative mindset outside of meetings and workshops.

What is the purpose of having ground rules?

You can claim £13.85 per hour for administrative activities carried out on behalf of the facilitator to run the group. You can claim £74.47 per hour if you are running an event with bought-in technical advice but you are also expecting to contribute, because you have technical knowledge of the subject. You should be clear in what capacity you are joining an event and be able to evidence how you spend your time. The table 5 gives an outline of eligible and ineligible activity and items.

Thank all of the participants for their input and energy and for making the meeting a success. Sometimes, people dominate a discussion because they are really passionate about an issue and have lots of things to say. One way to channel their interest is to suggest that they consider serving on a committee or task force on that issue. If someone like that shows up at your meeting, look further ahead in this chapter for some tips on dealing with “disrupters.”

What are facilitation skills and how to improve them?

This is also where the ground rules that we covered earlier come in. Do you provide training to organizations on how to facilitate meetings? Physical discomforts and unpleasant spaces can cause people to be more distracted, annoyed, or short-tempered than they would be if they were nourished, hydrated, and at ease. Trainers and presenters are also typically considered authorities on their subjects, but facilitators don’t need to have any special knowledge about the subject of the meeting.