Tips for great inclusive facilitation - Part 2

3 min readOct 14, 2019

In this series, I am sharing with you some great tips to apply when facilitating sessions. I’m trying to shed a light on inclusivity and its importance when it comes to team activities.

In Part One, I listed tips for the pre-session part of your facilitation journey. It covered agenda in the invitation, invitees, and the duration of an effective session. In this piece, I’ll move to the first few things that will need to be considered during a session.

Hello everyone!

Move away from “Hello guys!” to “Hello everyone!” or “Hey folks!” to make your opening more inclusive away from any gender references. Remember to introduce yourself this is the first time you’re meeting members of your group.

💡 Write your name somewhere visible to everyone, so they don’t struggle with it later.

First thing first

If you set your invite following my suggestions in Part one, your attendees will know why they are in the room. Still, it is a good practice to take a minute to go around the room and remind people why they are there.

💡Avoid any statements like “and Andy, you are here because I thought this would be interesting to you.”, remember you want people to be active contributors!

Ground rules

It is important to lay out the ground rules right at the beginning. You want your participants to bear them in mind throughout the session. Ground rules are things like when people can ask and interrupt you, “one discussion at a time”, adherence to Chatham House rule…etc.

Use this time to introduce any special tool(s) that you will use such as timers, rubber chickens (for timekeeping), talking ball or stick…etc.

💡If people are expected to use sticky notes, let them know that you are planning on using them later; thus legible writing and initials (if needed) are appreciated.

Slides can be optional but should be available

In my opinion, less wordy slides are better; you want people to be listening to you not reading off the screen and often squinting to read. If you decided on having slides, save people the question and the attempt to copy your slides or take pictures of them and let them know that you will make them available and how they can get them.

Are we on the same page?

Before diving in, iterate on the agenda and roles to make sure that everything is clear to everyone now and people can focus on the task at hand.

Engage and commit

A good way of engaging with the audience from the beginning is the old-fashion question of why are you here? (or something similar)

You could ask people to take a minute to write that down before shouting out. This will give people time to think and room for them to express themselves. Remember, individuals have a different level of confidence in expressing themselves in public, it is your responsibility to make sure everyone feels included and heard. This would also create a sense of commitment from the individual, e.g. “I’m here to learn more about…”

💡A pro practice is to take notes of most of these and try to address them during the session and then revisit them towards the end. You may need to adjust your approach to the session accordingly. This works well for relatively long sessions.

Some other things we often forget

Make sure you have the right mix of people in groups if needed. That could be vital for the dynamics of the session.
Remember to take notes or have someone doing so.
Have a look around before starting, to make sure that you have the right space and facilities for the sort of activities that you have in mind.

In this part, I listed some hints and tips to bear in mind at the beginning of your inclusive session. From your Hello to your ice breaker, going through rules, roles and slides. Each of these can be deployed as a tool to make sure that you are giving everyone a voice while running a great session.

Next time I will go through some of the things that can help you excel in facilitating the rest of your session whilst maintaining inclusivity.