Facilitating Effective Meetings

Make Your Meetings Meaningful

Meetings have a bad reputation as time-wasters, yet almost everyone can recall at least one meeting they considered worthwhile. Research has shown that people do not mind going to meetings if they see changes result from them. "Meeting facilitation" is a method of running meetings to make effective use of everyone's time, ensuring each meeting is enjoyable but creates measurable results. Built on a foundation of communications research and small-group psychology, the method TeamTrainers uses for facilitating effective meetings is easy to put in place with a little self-discipline. Yet it can bring radical change to groups who adapt it to their needs, for everything from regular team gatherings to annual retreats.

Learn How to Facilitate

This half-day class is appropriate for groups and their managers and teaches how to facilitate for maximum results, step-by-step:

• Setting meeting goals.
• Considering ways other than a meeting to meet those goals.
• Selecting attendees.
• Choosing an efficient agenda format.
• Creating and enforcing time-saving meeting rules, such as:
  
  • All members are equal.
  • No side conversations.
  • No electronics.
  • One subject at a time.
  • No decision without an action.
  • Silence or absence equals consensus.
• Guiding discussions.
• Solving meeting problems.
• Creating useful meeting minutes or notes.
• Ensuring results through action items and follow-up.

Students practice creating an agenda, creating rules, reading and challenging body language, and leading discussions. Though conducted at your preferred site and customized for your team's real-world issues, the per-person charge is usually less than you would pay for generic off-site training and includes a student guide. For a sample, download our free Meeting Agenda and Minutes Template for regular team meetings (a Microsoft Word file).

If facilitating meetings to get measurable results and please people sounds good to you, contact TeamTrainers.