Office1000 Blog June Archive

Things to Remember When Facilitating a Meeting

By Blog Stories at 06/11/2008 10:42

Part of anyone's professional life is either attending or facilitating a meeting. Saying that you can decide on your own for your company or group's future is a stupid thing to say since you are a group in the first place. Everybody should have the right to contribute his/her ideas to the group. This is why meetings are formed to discuss those ideas democratically.

Let us say that you are the appointed facilitator of a particular meeting. It is your first time to facilitate such an event. What are you going to do? There are many points to remember. Here are some that, I think, you should take note the most.

• Start exactly on the appointed time. Let us all be professional and do not wait for others who are still not there. Over time, they will realize that you start your meeting on time and those latecomers will change their acts. Just be sure that you already have a quorum or else you won't be able to decide on the issues you will be meeting about!
• State the agenda of your meeting and stick with it. I've already attended a lot of meetings wherein we just digress from our agenda and end up talking about things hardly related to the purpose of the meeting. While doing this, ensure that everyone is participating. It is supposed to be a meeting and not a lecture, anyway.
• Help your group come up with decisions. Even though you will not restrict your members from arguing points, it is still important that you will agree on something by the end of the meeting.
• Summarize what you have met about. Perhaps it would be best to have one of these digital recorders for future reference. This will also be the basis of your evaluation of the meeting.