Businesses that have not – and will not – rethink the spaces they live, work, and thrive in will be left behind. Our global, collective shift to more digital-centric, hybrid ways of working has only strengthened the need to evolve the way we collaborate and co-create.
This is why a major part of our work here at Limelights is equipping employees with the tools and skills to facilitate co-creation – and therefore, co-ownership – within their organizations.
Not sure what we mean? 🤨 Here’s an example: We organized a two-day, online learning experience with Royal HaskoningDHV Digital, a digital consultancy, software, and data solutions firm based in the Netherlands. We trained 10 ambitious employees to facilitate remote teams, who then went on to lead sprint teams to come up with innovative business ideas.
Here are three reasons why we think facilitation skills are must-haves on any future-proof team:
1️⃣ Facilitation can be used in day-to-day work
Facilitation involves a set of skills that move a group of people through meetings or sessions to successfully achieve a specific goal without getting directly involved. Key facilitation skills include active listening, time management, preparedness, flexibility, and empathy. Beyond these skills, facilitation skills are also strongly linked to achieving results, as they are effective in creating focus within a group toward reaching a specific goal. As you can imagine, these skills can also be highly effective in anyone’s daily work.
Emma Weisbord, Software Innovation Lead at Royal HaskoningDHV Digital, shares, “The experience of working together was transformative. The lessons that I learned from Limelights have been implemented on a day-to-day basis ever since and it made me remember how much I love facilitating and helping people tackle complex problems together.”
Whether it’s time management, listening, or finding new ways to collaborate, mastering the art of facilitation not only allows employees to learn new skills – but also to learn skills that can be applied to other aspects of their work.
2️⃣ Having facilitators on your team builds a culture of solutions
The challenge Royal HaskoningDHV Digital faced was how to engage and align their workforce in a hybrid world and bring people together to enhance society.
As Emma puts it, “As a team, our challenge was really figuring out how to work together in a distributed way. We had challenges of figuring out how to stay engaged, how to keep learning together, and finding ways to come together and work together as a team.”
By embedding facilitators in your own organization, you empower people to co-create positive solutions and drive change together. At Limelights, we share handy hybrid facilitation tricks that can support stronger connections between remote working teams.
“What we got from Limelights was a structured way of going through a process, which becomes a toolbox for us to work together as a team,” Emma explains. “Limelights really gave us the toolkit to be able to do that for ourselves and for clients.”
In sum, while facilitation draws on important skills like active listening and empathy, it also often employs a specific format or method, like SPRINT, to create a structured process to drive results.
3️⃣ Learning something new with colleagues is fun!
It’s not easy taking on these complex challenges all by yourself! In our Facilitators of Change Masterclass with Royal HaskoningDHV Digital, we equipped 10 employees to facilitate remote teams – engaging their fellow colleagues toward the company’s shared purpose.
“I loved training and learning with other colleagues to facilitate because we work in different cohorts,” Emma says. “It feels like a group of people I can now rely on for skills development and for questions that might come up with clients. We all started in this business line during COVID. It’s a really good way to create bonds remotely and to connect silos across the company.”
As we’ve seen, connected learning builds connected teams. 🌱 In our two-day session with Royal HaskoningDHV Digital, we created a “digital playground” for 150 employees to come together, learn, collaborate, and generate creative business solutions. By the end of the event, 10 business solutions were presented – all ready for immediate implementation into the business roadmap. The proof is in the pudding.
👉Want to build a culture of solutions and upskill your employees at the same time? Get in touch with us today to explore how you can harness the power of facilitation to drive positive change!
