Facilitation Skills Training

Develop in-house meeting and workshop facilitation skills

An expertly facilitated meeting or workshop dramatically improves efficiency and engagement. It can turn unproductive talking shops into engaging, interactive working sessions that deliver specified outcomes quickly and to a high quality. It has a very high return on investment.

Facilitation is a skill that can be learned; a capability that can be developed and held in house for use every day. Treehouse are the facilitation trainers for dstl (the Defence Science and Technology Lab) for whom solving very tricky problems is a matter of national security!

Facilitation skills can be used in any meeting or workshop, and it can be conducted virtually, face to face or a hybrid of the two.

Facilitating Meetings

The average employee spends 26.5 days in meetings every year – that’s more or less equivalent to their annual leave – and they say that 50% of the meetings are unproductive and 1 in 3 admit to switching off during meetings. This costs the UK economy £45bn per year. Investing in the skills to make your meetings engaging and productive will save your organisation money and make your people happier!

MODULE 1: Running Better Meetings

Covering the 5 elements of effective meetings plus the 6 golden tips for ‘front foot’ active facilitation, this module helps you learn how to plan meetings to achieve the outcomes efficiently and also how to deliver meetings in a virtual environment, including how to capture ideas and action points virtually when whiteboards and PostIts are not possible.

MODULE 2: Selecting and Practising Key Tools

This module will develop your confidence to design and run a collaborative, interactive working session using suitable tools in virtual, face to face and hybrid meetings.

Facilitating Workshops

Workshops are more formal, organised, probably longer sessions where a problem owner has a question to be answered by a group who may not normally come together. After Treehouse’s facilitation skills training you will have the knowledge, skills and confidence to design, develop and deliver workshops to a professional, high standard.

Our training covers the spectrum of skills needed – from the Foundation tools and techniques (the hard skills) through designing and delivering a workshop flow that delivers a clear outcome to the advanced, soft skills of people engagement and management of difficult delegates.  

Workshop Facilitation Skills – Foundation Level

The TREEANGLE methodology underpins this training – you’ll learn the simple 3 step process, 66 tools and 3 behaviours for successful facilitation. You will learn how to take a brief from the problem owner and define a single powerful question that needs to be answered by the workshop. You’ll be able to plan and deliver the workshop, to choose the right tools, formats and delegates to achieve the outcome and make the most of people’s valuable time. This interactive course is heavily focussed on action learning – where each facilitator gets to practise and receive feedback in the moment from the other delegates and trainer.

Workshop Facilitation Skills – Advanced Level

Building on the Foundation course, this Advanced level course covers soft skills such as how to engage delegates, facilitation for introverts, managing very vocal delegates and disruptors. You’ll also learn how to plan and deliver workshop programmes, combining workshops and asynchronous working plus the tech tools that can help. This interactive course is heavily focussed on action learning – where each facilitator gets to practise and receive feedback in the moment from the other delegates and trainer.

Virtual Facilitation Upskilling

Remote working looks set to continue as organisations increasingly implement hybrid working where people split their time between being in the office, at other sites and working from home.  Virtual meetings and workshops are here to stay!

Facilitating workshops remotely can be daunting, navigating different technology platforms and connection issues, as well as managing the participants to maximise their participation. This module will help you feel more capable and confident in designing and delivering workshops in face to face, virtual or hybrid environments. 

We will cover:

• The principles of facilitation and how careful planning is needed to select the right tools and technology to deliver the desired outcome whether that is virtual, face to face or a hybrid.

• How to capture and harvest ideas when there is no physical whiteboard or PostIts!

• Virtual facilitation tips