8 Ground Rules for Great Meetings

Ideally, this would be a cloud-based document all could review or add to at any time before or after the meeting. They’ll be much more attentive and happy to participate when you consider what’s on the agenda and how it relates to their job and tasks. Anything over 30 minutes is risking boredom, cell-phone checking, and side-conversations.

Robert, you did an extremely excellent job, hats down in your art of turning a novice into an expert, skillful facilitator. Crisp & comprehensive,I found this very, very useful as I embark on a training for academicians who now need to shift from lecture mode to facilitation mode. You’ve clearly articulated so many of the foundational pieces of preparing and facilitating a group.

Many of us go through our weekly work schedule without a lot of personal interaction with our co-workers. The store-wide meetings were probably the worst of these meetings. Lastly, we had irregular national meetings; costly affairs where all top leaders from around the globe were flown somewhere for a 3 or 4-day gathering. We also had monthly store meetings with all the employees of that store (often 150+).

What are Facilitation Skills and Why are They Important?

Also, you can use the special software that can make them easier. Also, facilitation saves time and creates a positive atmosphere in the group. Every person listens to each other, all thoughts are important, people help other members of this group. Impartiality can be an effective facilitation strategy in many situations, but it may not be advisable in every situation. All facilitators bring biases, preferences, and ideological dispositions into their work, of course, because no one is capable of perfect impartiality, neutrality, or objectivity. Steering clear of professional jargon or local slang, even if you think the definitions you’re using are obvious to everyone.

A great facilitator can assess this decision sometime later. Agile team facilitation is the art of making discussions in the group. The task of the specialist in facilitation is to plan and organize a process of communication between colleagues.

At certain times, you may be better off trying to speak to that person in private to discover what drives them, and at minimum, give feedback to help them understand how their behaviour affects the group. Interpersonal communication is again an important part of effective facilitation and ensuring you have these facilitation skills can make your job in a workshop much easier. Conflict-ridden topics will stir up emotions in participants, and arguments are a natural part of a discussion; however, not all people get heat equally.

The Ultimate Guide to Workshop Facilitation

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. This enables the team to develop a comprehensive, common set of information with which to solve problems and make decisions. Check back after each major part of the process to see if there are questions and that everyone understands and agrees with decisions that were made. If folks seem restless or in a haze, you may need to take a break, or speed up or slow down the pace of the meeting.

• It may be best to allow the discussion to continue as to not stunt the creative flow and adjust time elsewhere, i.e. shorten another part of the meeting to make up for the time.
• More importantly, though, we looked at some crucial meeting ground rules for facilitators that will skyrocket productivity and efficiency.
• While the skills outlined here are useful for dedicated facilitators, they can be applied by anyone to help create more fruitful and focused discussions whether you’re building consensus around how a team operates or solving a complicated problem.
• Enabling teams to do their best work by allowing the team to focus on the challenge at hand, instead of having to worry about the organization of the decision-making process.
• Good communication at all levels is absolutely integral for a facilitator and anyone involved in group facilitation.

People in the team need to want to do something significant and important. Companies that are focused only on an income without evaluation of the goal will crash themselves. Thus, facilitators need to understand the atmosphere in the group and take it into account.

Introduction to Facilitation

And if you don’t take care of them, they will simply develop in the group naturally, outside of your control. So make it a RULE to set expectations for your participants at the start of the workshop to minimize the risk of them feeling disengaged, overwhelmed, or drained. Trainers help others improve their performance by teaching, instructing, or facilitating learning. As such, facilitation and presentation are both tools in a trainer’s toolkit. In most cases, effective and engaging trainers will spend less time presenting content through lectures or lecturettes and more time facilitating learning around that content. Whether in a classroom or a meeting, effective facilitators must focus on group dynamics and processes.

Many were run by people who had no clue about meeting ground rules for facilitators, as it wasn’t anything we were ever trained on. Active listening not only ensures clarity of understanding but also serves to reveal assumptions in decision-making that can be easily missed during group discussions. By modeling active listening, facilitators set an example for other members of the group, enabling more fruitful communication as team members adopt the practice. A facilitator ensures there’s adequate time for the team to accomplish what they set out to do.Timeboxing is one way to prevent teams from getting stuck on details or lost in lengthy debates with no resolution. By segmenting activities into blocks of time, a facilitator can ensure goals are accomplished within the allotted time while also freeing her up to focus on team interactions. Choosing a timekeeping option that is visible to the team provides a cue individuals can use to self-manage their contributions.

In short, a meeting where the topic are likely to hit people personally and get them riled up. 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. Going back to the store meetings I mentioned above, many of these topics are deathly dull; changes in HIPPA laws, changes to company 401k matching, etc. These were mandatory meetings of all store personnel and most of the time were held in the early morning hours. If you consider the goal and how many get executed, you can see why in most cases, meetings are horribly inefficient.

UX Webinar: Using Click Testing to Answer UX Research Questions

The goal of every meeting is typically to make creative and effective decisions together. Therefore, all efforts are aimed to arrive at said decisions. Facilitators serve as both the liaison to extract and connect peoples’ ideas and also to organize the thoughts to reach conclusions. Getting input from a diverse group of people often leads to better ideas thanks to a greater level of expertise among team members as well as the variety of perspectives applied to a given goal or problem to solve; many heads are better than one.

It’s okay to be friendly but you don’t need to try to befriend a participant. If a participant is uncooperative, end the session gracefully (compensate them and don’t invite them back). Participants have to know they can stop at any time, ask questions, and speak up if they feel uncomfortable . Most studies are straightforward and painless for the participant, but can get complicated when participants need to make a purchase, log in to their accounts, or use other private information to complete tasks. Be sure participants have a general idea of what they need to do before they participate to minimize potentially uncomfortable situations. The power of the facilitative process lies in our ability to empower others.

What are the benefits of having ground rules for meetings?

If for any reason you are not content-neutral as a facilitator, you should be clear about this with the group from the beginning. Try to make explicit when you are wearing your ‘facilitator hat’ and when you are using your ‘participant/content-expert agile team facilitation basic rules hat’. Still, the two worlds do overlap when it comes to speaking in front of a group and managing group conversations. The ability to communicate clearly, both verbally and non-verbally, is extremely relevant to both trainers and facilitators alike.

Facilitating a productive conversation or meeting requires ample preparation. To guide a group of people to a successful outcome, facilitators need to be clear on the end goal and the milestones to be achieved along the way. Facilitators create the conditions for success by evaluating whether the time allotted for the meeting is realistic for achieving the goal, ensuring the right people are in the room, and providing the necessary materials for the work to be done. If only areas of “agreement” are recorded, the record often reflects the majority viewpoint of dominant groups, which can be selectively biased in any number of ways.

Use body language of our own

Agreements such as “assume good intentions” or “trust one another” are two examples. For example, “assume positive intentions” is not a productive group agreement if staff members routinely experience workplace bias or discrimination because of their gender identity, race, or sexuality. When establishing group agreements, facilitators should remain mindful of history, identity, culture, and other factors that may influence how participants experience a dialogue, process, or other activity. In organizing, engagement, and equity work, the outcome of a dialogue and decision-making process typically emerges from the process—that is, the process is not manipulated to arrive at an outcome that’s been determined in advance by those in positions of power or authority. Because facilitation skills take time and practice to acquire, schools, organizations, and communities may not have enough skilled facilitators available unless they proactively invest in building facilitation capacity well before that capacity is needed.

You cannot be an effective facilitator and a participant at the same time. When you cross the line, you risk alienating participants, causing resentment, and losing control of the meeting. Offer strategies, resources, and ideas for the group to work with, butnot opinions. Along with these tips on facilitation, there are some things you can do both to prevent disruption before it occurs to stop it when it’s happening in the meeting.

Create an inclusive environment

The environment and general “climate” of a meeting or planning session sets an important tone for participation. Recording key takeaways of a conversation is essential for keeping group progress on track and avoiding circling back to the same topics. As a competent facilitator, you should make sure to capture and highlight the key messages – whether that is via visual recording (i.e. arranging post-it notes, sketches, etc. made by participants), or written records (i.e. writing up conclusions).