How to Facilitate a Stress Management Meeting

Sitting in a circle at a meeting helps engage a larger group and helps all participants feel included.

Facilitating a stress management meeting does not have to be itself stressful. With some preparation and planning, you can make a stress-tackling gathering fun for everyone, leaving you the facilitator, and the attendees, feeling relaxed if not nirvanic when it's over. Both the organization and the employees benefit from learned stress management, making your role as facilitator very important. Facilitators can take advantage of a number of instructional strategies and stress relievers to engage participants in the meeting and accomplish the meeting's objectives. As facilitator, you should fully understand the contexts of workplace stress and be able to provide real solutions to make the meeting effective. Realize that as facilitator you are an instrument of change.

Instructions

1. Analyze the audience and determine their stress management needs. A good facilitator will design a meeting that is relevant and most effective for the situation rather than using a general design. Collect data for analysis with quick surveys, interviewing management and employees, and observation. You want to identify the stress management needs before you begin planning your meeting.

2. Design strategies for how the meeting will address the audience's stress management needs. Stress management needs may include important topics as effective communication, organization and task prioritization, stress reduction techniques and seeing challenges as learning opportunities. The needs resulting from the analysis should be supported with specific strategies that will provide solutions. Work to make your strategies appropriate for different learning styles.

3. Develop what you planned in the design process. This can include creating visuals, arranging facilities, selecting icebreakers or games, developing presentation tools, obtaining equipment, ordering supplies such as stress balls, or getting preliminary feedback on your proposed meeting agenda. The development process is where the design comes to life and turns into a prepared meeting, just waiting for the audience.

4. Implement the stress management meeting. First, guide the meeting through the agenda. Communicate expectations and the objectives of the stress management meeting. Let the participants know what stress management skills or knowledge they can expect to gain in the meeting and how they will benefit from the meeting. Get the audience's attention, direct the audience's learning and engage the audience. Provide time for questions at the end of the meeting.

5. Evaluate participants' learning at the end with a fun questionnaire that shows you what they learned, if anything. Solicit feedback from participants on your facilitation of the meeting. This may generate helpful feedback that is useful for identifying areas that may require an additional meeting or training, for improving future meetings and for improving your effectiveness as facilitator. Feedback from an evaluation can also provide evidence for the value of stress management meetings.

References

• Mind Tools: The Role of a Facilitator
• Business Training Tools: Free Icebreakers
• Clarity Seminars: Breaking the Cycle of Stress
• The Charmm'd Foundation: Successful Packaged Learning Experiences: Stress Management