Facilitation for meetings, away days and corporate retreats

Facilitation: Using a facilitator for group meetings, away days and workshops enables everyone to participate fully and helps you achieve things that could not even be considered in a normal office meeting.

Facilitation by a professional facilitator

Facilitation by an independent facilitator, briefed by the team leader, ensures that time is well spent and all individuals are able to participate fully. As well as managing the process, a professional facilitator can also introduce new processes and elements of training, activities to improve communication and management games, as well as specialist activities such as scenario planning.

In many organisations having annual board or corporate retreats is routine, for progress reviews, strategy and budget preparation, or for 'blue sky' thinking. For teams with new members, or starting new projects, a team awayday or a two day residential workshop pays dividends and ensures an increase in both cohesion and performance. For teams whose members are based at different sites, the residential element is an important feature.

Here are some examples of activities that a facilitator could include in a meeting, workshop or retreat: -

• Personal aspirations and outcomes for the retreat
• Personal introductions and aspirations
• Communication exercise
• Strategy development
• Vision, mission and values
• Scenario planning
• Modelling the current organisation
• Designing the future organisation
• Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis
• Technology, Customers, Competition, Regulatory and Environment analysis
• Political, Environmental, Economic, Sociological and Technological environments analysis
• Brainstorming
• Setting well-formed outcomes
• Balanced business scorecard
• Psychometric profiling and feedback
• Action planning, reporting systems and contracting
• Introduction of specific ideas, exercises or publications

In addition to workshop activities, meals together and a complete break, with some outdoor activities, are excellent bonuses that allow the mind to consolidate the learning and be more creative, and board members to relax together.

Facilitation is a structured approach to achieving outcomes

Brefi Group facilitates group meetings, away days and workshops internationally. We ensure that each event is structured to achieve a previously agreed outcome, but is flexible and responsive enough to deal with whatever arises, whether it be a business issue or inter-personal. Using a facilitator enables everyone to participate fully and provides a safe environment in which to confront sensitive issues.

Our vision, mission & values workshops draw on learnings from NLP and the Disney Institute. Independent facilitation is particularly valuable during the budget and strategy planning season. Brefi Group has a simple and effective scenario planning model.

Facilitation for meetings, away days and executive retreats is designed to bring structure to the process, develop skills and generate ownership of shared beliefs, values, identity and purpose.

Lots of reasons for getting away together

Whether your objective is to get to know each other better, team building to work together better, to be more innovative, to explore scenarios, or to get down to work on your strategy, business plan or budget, you will achieve much, much more if you get away, change the environment and allow time for the process – and employ a professional facili tator.

And, of course, you can let your imagination run and run, just in the planning of the event. We have facilitated activities in city hotels, country house hotels, on boats, Texas ranches, mountain lodges - and included activities such as walking in the countryside, mountain biking, horseback riding and white water rafting. And lots of thought provoking indoor activities too. And there is always golf!

These activities break the normal state, change the environment, stimulate new thoughts and relationships. More, they can be designed as metaphors for the project in hand and used as examples throughout the workshop.

Visit our exciting photo gallery and see what others have done already.

What to do next about facilitation

If you have an event in mind that would benefit from an independent facilitator, or would like to discuss how facilitation works, then contact us now. Otherwise, why not explore this site further?

There are lots of detailed pages on this site, so if you have a specific interest, please use the search box at the top of the page. If you would like to know more about us please complete our contact form, or visit our photo gallery to discover the range of activities and locations that we can arrange, or ...