The Ideal Length of a Training or Facilitation Is…
"An hour should be enough time for this team-building activity, right?"
"The offsite agenda is tight. I only have 90 minutes for you to facilitate this discussion. Will that work?"
"Our staff is busy. It's going to be hard to convince them to attend a half-day soft skills workshop. Can you shorten it?"
These are common sentiments I hear from current and potential clients. Customers are savvy enough to know that external support is needed to guide the learning experience, but the request comes with strict parameters.
I get it. You're constrained by budget, time, and/or resistance. You've got important agenda items to address during the staff retreat but want to include a "fun" activity that sets the tone for the rest of the session. You know that your staff is burnt out and overwhelmed, so having them dedicate an entire morning to improving their non-technical skills seems counterintuitive. In fact, half of your team has never met in person and now that they're returning to the office, you have to focus on process improvement, etc. You don't have the capacity for a highly engaging facilitation or in-depth training.
But, as a trainer and facilitator, I’m here to tell you that deep discussions that dig into the root of an issue and explore solutions can't happen in 90 minutes.
In an ideal world, we shape the facilitation duration and content based on your needs. More often than not, however, the client comes to us and says, "I'd like to have a 90-minute facilitated discussion on topic XYZ."
I cannot tell you how many times a client who pushed hard to shorten a facilitated discussion or activity has sheepishly admitted afterward that they now understand why I said that I wanted more time.
So, how much time should be allocated for facilitations? The simple answer is that it depends. Here are some factors to consider:
What do you want to accomplish? Be honest with yourself. Are you checking a box to show your staff that you hear them? Are you looking for substantial behavioral changes? Do you want the team to let loose, have some fun, and bond in the process? Do you want them to learn one specific skill to implement back in the workplace? The duration of the facilitation or training is impacted by your answer to those questions.
Has the facilitator worked with your group before? Trust takes time to build and if your team has never met the facilitator, they won't inherently open up and share their deepest vulnerabilities with a complete stranger in the first 15 minutes of meeting. Of course, us facilitators have several tricks up our sleeves to quickly establish trust between us and the group, but even the most skilled facilitator can't build up enough trust and set a tone of psychological safety within the group AND explore the depth of a core issue AND aid the group in processing and figuring out a solution in 60 minutes. If it's the first time that your group is meeting this facilitator, you need to build in some extra time for both parties to establish ground rules and trust.
How many people are attending? The biggest breakthroughs come when participants have an opportunity to speak up in a small, safe environment. The ideal number of attendees per small group is 4-12. Any more than 12 attendees generally require breakout sessions where the group can discuss in smaller, safer environments and then debrief with the larger group. We have to factor in physically or virtually moving these groups, bringing them back together, and debriefing long enough to have each group talk. That takes time. Structured small group discussion that involves meaningful team discussion and actionable items, along with the associated debrief, take 20-30 minutes minimum.
What are your expectations/How quickly do you want to see results? As a trainer, I am the first to say that training/workshops/facilitations are a tool in your toolbox. A 90-minute workshop on presentation skills does not a TEDTalk make. A three-hour team building activity and debrief will start to get your team more comfortable with one another and will likely lead to some breakthrough "ah-ha!" moments, but it won't solve systemic issues that will resurface as soon as you return to the office.
How badly does your staff need to talk? I'm not asking you how talkative or jovial your team is with one another. What I'm asking you to consider the last time you've had your team come together and provided the opportunity to talk in a safe space with a neutral person about systemic challenges in your group or organization. Facilitated discussions often unearth a whole box of worms/open Pandora's box. Many times, deep-rooted issues come to the surface during a discussion, and time constraints prevent facilitators from diving deeper to explore this. Often, spending the time then and there at the moment to address these issues will save you much more time on the back end trying to backpedal to figure out in a different environment what you need to do to fix it.
There are many creative options to meet your facilitation or learning needs. Don't have time for a half-day session during your offsite? Let's try a 90-minute session during your offsite and then meet again in two months for another 90 minutes to continue reinforcing the intended behavior.
Want your team to “bond?” We can facilitate one live teambuilding activity and then create a teambuilding plan for you to implement independently once you return to the office.
Does your team need to get ramped up on foundational concepts? We can create asynchronous learning opportunities for team members to review independently prior to the live meeting, so that everyone is coming in with the same baseline of knowledge.
The bottom line is that there is no exacting formula to determine how much time you should allocate for training or facilitation. At Mt. Vernon Consulting, we will happily walk you through various considerations and formats to help you find the perfect learning solution.