Organisations need to consult and engage with employees and these groups need to be well structured and designed so that they can add valuable insights into an organisation and not just operate as a "talking shop". To meet this challenge we created a skills programme for focus group leaders in a University setting. The group leaders had some experience of facilitating groups but needed to find ways of encouraging wider levels of participation.

The skills programme explored some of the current barriers to participation in the various groups and provided a range of practical tools which they could use to increase levels of engagement and participation in the groups. These included structured problem solving techniques: Four Box Grid, Force Field Analysis and What If Scenairos.

The evaluation of the implementation of the workshop showed that the group leaders made a number of changes to the way that they were running their groups which increased attendance and reputation of the consultation process. The workshop gave them a range of tools to use to engage different participants and to move beyond the standard focus group "talking shop" into something which genuinely gave everyone an opportunity to put forward their views.

The University was able to use the feedback from the groups to make changes to policies and procedures knowing that these changes had a broad level of support.

If you would like your focus groups to be more active and to produce valid feedback then contact us for an informal discussion: +44 (0)1943 877389/ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it