10 Tips For Facilitating Successful Meetings
Meetings are a core part of working life and they can be both a valuable tool and an ineffective drain on our time. The difference between a good one and a bad one has a significant impact on the outcome of the meeting.
How meetings are run is a major factor in achieving the desired results, whether that’s a decision made, or an action plan outlined. That’s why having someone facilitate the process can be invaluable so that things stay on track and get to the point.
You can bring in a professional facilitator to help, or provide facilitation training for your team so you always have someone in-house to help. But, for the basics, here are some of my top tips for facilitation a successful meeting.
What is a Facilitator?
A facilitator is someone whose role it is to ensure that the meeting achieves desired outcomes.
Or, to put it simply, they make sure that the meeting does what it’s meant to and isn’t a waste of everyone’s time.
Not all meetings need a facilitator and facilitators come in different shapes and sizes. There are, however, a few principles, tools and techniques that will help you facilitate meetings effectively and get those all-important outcomes.
How to Facilitate a Meeting
What’s the Point: Creating an Agenda
Firstly, answer the following questions:
- What is the meeting for?
- What does it need to achieve?
- What is its purpose?
Once you know the answer to these questions you can start to put together an agenda. Agendas do many things, but a key one is that they help you decide whether there is enough time and resource to achieve the outcomes required. If the outcomes are not realistic then you need to do something different. That could mean arranging several meetings, each focussing on sequential elements, or a full day rather than half a day, or face-to-face rather than online.
Don’t over-egg it though. If you don’t need a full morning then don’t plan the meeting for a whole morning. People have plenty to do and if and they don’t see the point of a long meeting, they will either lose focus, leave early, or possibly not attend at all.
Create Structure
The agenda is key in creating structure, but before you start on it, consider:
- Who needs to be there. What happens (or doesn’t happen) if they aren’t?
- What resources you need to run the meeting?
- Is the meeting online or in person?
- Do you need refreshments like tea and coffee?
In my experience, biscuits and cakes are always a winner. Make a point of building positive relationships with everyone. It helps create a collaborative, relaxed and psychologically safe environment.
Next, think about how the meeting will be constructed.
Think about what needs to happen, when.
Plan timings carefully and stick to them.
Do you need to build in some flexibility? This will depend on the type of meeting.
Keep revisiting the agenda to ensure it’s all relevant. Every section of the meeting needs to contribute to the outcome.
It may seem obvious, but plan breaks for longer meetings. This helps everyone and in particular those who might be neurodiverse or have other needs. In order to be successful you need engagement and focus, so what do you need to put in place to enable that?
Make sure that the attendees know the intended outcome. You should also share the completed agenda in plenty of time ahead of the meeting so that attendees can plan for it. Consider including a list of what they need to prepare, as well as a list of all attendees.
Understand Your Role
Ideally, as a facilitator, your role in a meeting is not to take part. With that, I mean that you are not there for your opinion on the topic: you are there to make sure the meeting runs smoothly and that it achieves its outcomes.
Often, though, you will find yourself in the position of both facilitator and attendee at the same time. It’s helpful to have a good idea of when you need to do in order to fulfil each role. Be conscious of which role you are performing at all times.
Agree Behaviours
It often helps to be aware of patterns of thought and behaviour. For example, what frame of mind will people show up with? Will they be negative, positive, pragmatic, realistic or curious?
In order to get the best outcomes we need to promote diversity of thought, a concept that requires different opinions, perceptions, and perspectives. However, such diversity of thought can inevitably create challenge. Your job as a facilitator is to enable positive and respectful discussion to stop a challenge becoming a conflict. If you think this might happen, one useful technique is to get people to agree to a charter of how they will behave and work together in the meeting. Then, if they stray from this agreement, they can be brought back to what the agreed behaviours are. It’s not about punishment, its about finding ways of working that ensure that everyone can share their thoughts and be met respectfully, even in disagreement.
Ensure Everyone is Heard
Have you heard from the quiet person at the back yet? While the more vocal attendees are discussing an issue, this person may have already come up with the solution. But if they aren’t heard, it will get missed.
As a facilitator, your role is to ensure everyone in the meeting has their say and shares their thoughts. After all, if their input isn’t needed in this meeting, why were they invited? This works the other way too – a small percentage of voices shouldn’t be allowed to completely take over to the detriment of the whole meeting.
Collaboratively Record Ideas, Decisions and Next Steps
Recording the information generated is important, but just having someone taking minutes isn’t necessarily enough. Try ways of recording information that also gets people moving around and produces visual cues. For example, post it notes, flip charts and whiteboards can all help the process and stimulate further thought.
The VAK model (Walter Barbe) is common way of looking at how we process information. VAK stands for:
- Visual learners who process information through images and looking,
- Auditory learners who process information through listening, and
- Kinaesthetic learners who process information by doing and moving.
What it shows is that just sitting and talking often isn’t enough to get the best out of people.
‘Park’ Off-Topic Ideas
There will inevitably be ideas and conversations that stray away from the topic. A ‘park’ board is a helpful tool to deal with these. Simply write the idea or conversation topic on the board and make sure that it can be revisited at a later date. Your role as a facilitator is to identify these ideas and conversations, make sure they are parked, and then get the meeting back on track.
Clarify and Check for Understanding
Another key role for a facilitator is clarifying understanding, particularly on the important stuff. It is essential that you regularly check around the room for understanding.
People filter and interpret information to meet their view of the world and so will understand things differently to what might have originally been intended. Repeating back what you think you have heard is a good way of ensuring everyone is on the same page. It can be helpful to uses phrases like “what I think I’m hearing is… is that right?”
Create and Assign Actions
Before wrapping up the meeting, make sure that there is a list of agreed actions. These should be recorded and, vitally, have an owner and a timeline. Without specifying who is responsible and agreeing a deadline, actions will inevitably drop off into the ether, never to be thought about again until the next meeting.
After the Meeting
After a meeting, someone needs to have the responsibility of writing up minutes or, at the very least, a list of actions with their owners and timelines. These should then be shared with everyone so each attendee has the same record and knows what they’re doing next.
It may seem a small thing, but you should also thank people for attending. As a facilitator, it’s your responsibility to build a positive relationship with everyone involved and it’s the small gestures like this that can have the biggest impact.
Conclusion
A meeting facilitator plays an important role in ensuring meetings go to plan, stay on track, and move objectives forward. This will involve creating an appropriate structure and ensuring everyone sticks to it, making sure everyone has a say, and wrapping meetings up with actionable next steps.
At Harrison Network, we have a number of highly experienced team members who can either help you develop your own facilitation skills or facilitate those all-important meetings for you. Please just get in touch to find out more.#
Author: Nev Holmes, Programme & Operations Lead
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