Facilitation

Overview

Meetings can often feel like hard work with little actually achieved towards the specific goal. Great facilitation will result in more productive meetings, useful outcomes and happy attendees. Facilitation is the art of guiding a group of people through a meeting to successfully achieve a specific outcome.

Who can be a facilitator?

Anyone, is the short answer. It doesn’t matter what your job title is; everyone has the ability to be the facilitator in a meeting. However there are a couple key points you should think on before volunteering for the role, or considering if you should look for an external facilitator:

• A facilitator should be a neutral party to the discussion. This allows the group to focus on the discussion rather than trying to facilitate and contribute.
• A facilitator should avoid being the expert on a subject. Their role is to listen, question, keep the meeting on track and provide tools and options to get the most out of the session.

Both of the above points imply that you can’t facilitate a meeting for a team if you’re part of that team, and sometimes that is the case, but if you’re able to see all sides of an issue while still holding your own opinion, you’ll be a fine facilitator.

Best practices for facilitation

Before

• Attendees: Make sure the right people are in the meeting. Sometimes people take this to mean they need to invite as many people as possible in order to cover all the bases. But if you only need two people involved, then only invite two people; just make sure they’re the right two.
• Agenda: There is no easier way to go off track with a meeting than to not have an agenda. If you’re not clear on the purpose of the meeting, or what you’d like to cover during and have achieved by the end of it, then it is extremely hard to reach a satisfactory conclusion in time. As the facilitator, you don’t necessarily need to come up with the agenda as you may not have the correct context, but it’s your responsibility to ensure that one is prepared and shared, preferably well before the meeting. This gives participants a chance to prepare and challenge the value of the meeting itself.
• Setup: Give yourself time ahead of a meeting to get set up; whether that is with stationary in a room or technology for remote calls. You don’t want to use valuable meeting time setting everything up, and participants are likely to be less engaged if they have to start a meeting by waiting.

During

• Contracting: Setting aside time at the start of a meeting to define what is and isn’t OK during the meeting will help keep your meeting focused and let everyone know exactly what is expected of them. Examples include things like: everyone should participate, and all distractions should be turned off during the meeting (phones/slack etc).
• Time-keeping: Part of setting the agenda involves defining time blocks in which to cover the various agenda items. Your job as a facilitator is to ensure those times are stuck to as much as possible. There will be cases where some points may require more or less time, so make sure all participants are happy to adjust the original agreement.
• Breaks: People can only hold focus for a certain amount of time before they stop processing the information coming at them, so make sure your factor breaks in to any of your meetings that are particularly long. A general rule is 5/10 minutes every hour.
• Summarise where you’ve got to ahead of the break so participants can digest it while they’re away from the meeting.
• Notes: It’s difficult to facilitate a meeting and take notes for it at the same time, so find someone else to take notes. Ideally ahead of time, but at the start of the meeting is fine if you’ve not been able to, or the person who was taking notes is unable to attend. They should capture important discussion points as well as any actions that are agreed. These should be summarised at the end of the meeting.

After

• Summary: Make sure the notes are sent out as a summary of the meeting to all participants (or a wider group of stakeholders if that’s the process for the particular format of meeting you’ve facilitated). This will reinforce what was covered during, and provide accountability.
• Follow up on actions: It’s easy to agree on actions, but hard to follow through on them. Agree a date for actions to be completed by and then check they’ve been achieved. If not, help figure out why.

The following meetings normally benefit from having a facilitator. There's also a guide on how to make them remote first: