Are you tired of spinning your wheels every day at the office? Have you tried unsuccessfully to get and keep your staff motivated to succeed? If you want to increase productivity and instill a true sense of teamwork in your employees, then hiring a meeting facilitator may be the way to go.

It’s Friday morning, and your weekly/monthly team meeting is about to begin. You are sitting in your office going over last month’s production reports and profit and loss statements and can’t help but question why the numbers are declining. You take a moment to collect your thoughts and reassure yourself that today will be different, that harboring negative perceptions is pointless and counterproductive. With your new found motivation and drive to get things done, you set off to the conference room with reports in hand, ready to address your staff. You find that most of your employees are ready to go with the remaining few trickling in slowly. Everyone is alert and all eyes are on you.

For a moment, you are confident that today’s meeting will be different than the last. It is off to a good start and your employees appear interested in the subject matter, but you quickly notice the tell-tale signs of distraction start to appear. People start whispering to themselves quietly, perhaps mulling over the seemingly “same ol same ol,” but more than likely they are discussing what each one did the night before. By the time the meeting reaches it end, you wonder whether your hard work and effort was worth it.

Does this scenario sound at all familiar? Every day, the disease of the “bad meeting” plagues workplaces across the country, accomplishing little more than a brief get-together and a simple overview of problems that aren’t being properly addressed. If you want to increase your company’s productivity and ignite the spark of motivation in your employees, FindaFacilitator.com can help! We offer Meeting Transformation Services that are custom designed to suit the needs of every individual client. Our consultants are highly-trained experts in the field of corporate facilitation and organizational restructuring. They know how to spot the most common meeting problems and address them effectively. Here are just a few ways we can help your business escape the dreaded cycle of “bad meeting syndrome.”

How to Make Your Meetings More Effective

• Engagement; people are interested in things that help them, it is just human nature. Instead of touting statistics and crunching numbers, getting employees involved by taking introducing creative alternative is a must. Everyone learns differently, and only a small number benefit from reading text.
• Participation; healthy discourse is the recipe for meeting success. Encourage team members to voice their opinions, and don’t be afraid to call on people directly. Some of the greatest ideas often fall to the wayside because someone didn’t speak up.
• The shorter the better; the average attention span has actually decreased, due in large part to the advancements in technology. Don’t spend an hour talking about something that can be adequately summed up in five minutes. Keep the information concise and creative, and don’t forget to switch things up presentation-wise. Take advantage of social media tools.

Almost every professional has been to a company meeting that, for one reason or another, accomplished nothing. Along with the unnerving aspect, unproductive meetings are also uneconomical. By wasting the time of its employees, an unproductive meeting wastes a company’s money, and the useless expenditure could produce a negative influence for years. When meetings stop producing results, a company should hire a facilitation professional as soon as possible. With the timely help of facilitation, most companies can resolve the following problems before they become too ingrained:

Lack of Focus

When a meeting lacks focus, it is often because team members are unaware of how to address an issue, or because their ideas for addressing it lack a strategic approach. By helping team members think strategically about an issue, meeting facilitators help them develop the strategic focus necessary to resolve the issue.

Lack of Motivation

After a group has tried unsuccessfully to resolve a problem, it can suffer from a lack of motivation. A skilled facilitator can motivate a group by helping it gain new insight into the source of a problem, and what can be done efficiently and economically to resolve the problem.

Negative Group Dynamics

Some meetings are hindered by poor relationships between certain team members—a problem that could be difficult for other team members to address. If the meetings at your company are starting to seem like showcases for personal
rivalries, meeting facilitation can help diffuse the rivalries and restore positive group dynamics.

Lack of Insight

Many groups lack insight, not because they lack the capacity for it, but because they adhere to an outdated way of thinking. This often happens when a team undertakes a new type of project without changing the approach it used for previous projects. Facilitators can help team members gain insight by helping them adapt their thinking to the issue at hand.

Poor Individual Behavior

Because professionals are expected to behave professionally, dealing with a deviate team member could be difficult. Although official penalties are an option, requesting the help of a facilitator, who can diffuse bad behavior by refusing to let it set the tone of a meeting, can be the more profitable option. When troublemakers notice their bad behavior has no affect, they often abandon their quarrelsome attitude.

Does Your Company Need Facilitation?

If the meetings at your company have become unproductive, we can help. By supplying a variety of specialized facilitators, we make it easy for companies to select a facilitator who can satisfy their needs. We also supply facilitators whose fees are affordable on a variety of budgets, and who travel to most destinations around the globe.

The problems above are common reasons why companies seek meeting facilitation. Other reasons include:

• Difficulty turning ideas into actions
• Lack of participation in meetings
• Difficulty prioritizing problems
• Trouble conducting timely meetings
• Need for an impartial speaker to address a sensitive issue

Successful meetings are not always easy to accomplish. Professional managers struggle with getting their employees to focus on the task at hand and to work toward a common goal. Everyone has their own idea of what should be done to reach a solution. Individuals get off track, become stuck on a particular factor, or have difficulty stepping away from older practices. Outside help for your most pertinent business meetings can be quite beneficial.

Facilitation is a service you can employ to assist with high priority gatherings. A facilitator operates as a mediator between all involved parties. Productivity and solutions are the goals of meeting facilitation. You can use this service to solve a specific problem, make an important decision, or for an essential brainstorming session.

An Easier Way to Find the Best Facilitators

Facilitators do not take over the meeting by leading the session. Instead, they are a third party who observes and only interacts when necessary. They make certain everyone gets the chance to share their ideas. Most professionals want to keep the meeting moving in a positive direction. They attempt to do this without being a distraction to the gathered group. Finding a reliable facilitator does not have to be a difficult or time consuming task.

You can use Find a Facilitator to easily locate the right professional for your next important gathering. Our online database of professionals is available for annual retreats, conferences, strategic planning, process redesigns, teambuilding, issue resolution, and basic meetings.

How can you use our service to find the best facilitators available? It is a simple process where you first use our database to search through possible hires. Every facilitator has created a professional profile listing their skills, experience, certifications, and previous projects, and their billing rates are clearly represented within this profile. An online virtual assistant will require various questions to be answered for better assistance. Once these answers have been evaluated, you will be provided three service choices.

Your business can manage the whole process, obtain partial support, or select full support. The chosen level determines how involved you are during the processes of interviewing and contracting these professionals. You choose the amount of involvement desired for selection of your meeting expert.

Meeting facilitation has many benefits that can be used to the advantage of your business. An experienced professional provides objectivity in an unbiased manner. This objectivity makes it easier to see each attendant’s perspective on the discussed topics. A facilitation expert encourages all attendees to think outside the box and works hard to make certain each person is allowed to voice his or her ideas to the team. The playing field is leveled out to obtain good input from every individual.

Additional benefits received include elimination of personal agendas, reduced negativity, better use of time, complete focus on important issues, and a safe environment. Experts keep everyone working together toward the goal and create open discussion among the group. You can use our service to select the best facilitator available. The benefits will be hard to ignore once you have seen them in action.