Facilitator Resources

The room has white, curved walls, spotlighted with pink hues. Pastel-colored globes hang from the ceiling. If the members of the group in the room aren't drawing sketches on the walls, they may be playing with puppets or Lego logs.

Even the healthiest companies must make dramatic reductions in staff and overall spending to remain viable in what may be the worst economy most of us will see in our lifetimes. As staff is cut, more is asked of those who remain.

Even if you’ve had years of experience leading groups, you’re bound to feel a little anxious when you are asked to facilitate a virtual meeting, especially one that replaces a traditional face-to-face one. The two best ways to alleviate your fears are first, detailed planning, and second, practice.

A virtual meeting is an event or series of events where participants join in from multiple locations. A virtual meeting may be held "real time" where everyone is participating as the same time, often by teleconference or video conference.

Remote teams are a workplace reality. In a recent survey, over 75% of respondents said that they meet remotely at least twice a month. While convenient and cost effective, these virtual meetings can easily go off-track.

You've got a very short time to come up with some great new ideas to turn the business around. Fortunately, you have access to some of the most creative minds in your company from dozens of locations around the world.

Health research and service provision are two of the most important and costly components of modern life. But they are fraught with profound ethical and priority setting issues which complicate decisions about what research and services are in the overall public good. It is critical that citizens be allowed to participate in these decisions.

Most facilitators and team leaders see the value of assigning some sort of pre-work before a virtual meeting and bemoan the fact that only a small fraction of the participants take this request seriously and complete their assignments.

Objectives and Context:
1. To hear different perspectives from a panel of experts
2. To engage conference participants in lively discussion of issues and approaches
3. To leave with a sense of community - that together we are grappling with the important issues and seeing possible solutions to our most difficult challenges
4. To capture the ideas emerging from the group as part of the conference documentation