Someone in a green t-shirt holding a green hat.
"...and if there's any more [questions or feedback], please come and see one of us in the green t-shirts". How do we make it as easy as possible for participants - and the rest of the facilitation team - to spot us in a crowd?
Farmers who have been taking part in pilots for the new Sustainable Farming Incentive system came together to give feedback to the Defra team. This was a classic consultation event: no decisions were being made in the room. Instead, the client organisation wanted to harvest as much detail about what's working and what's not. So there were facilitators on every table and lots of worksheets for people to record their feedback on. The 'green t-shirts' are referenced at 5.15 on this video. Well done to the team from Sheffield University who ran these pilot learning events.
In large events, you want to make it as easy as possible for participants to find one of the team if they need them. It's also helpful for participants to be able to see easily who else is a participant, and who is part of the team. This can be particularly useful in high-stakes situations, where people need reassurance about who is listening to which conversations.
If you're in the room together, t-shirts are a great option. I have been part of large group events where conversation process facilitators were in one colour shirt, and tech and housekeeping team in another. I've also seen different coloured tabards used.
Online, use the 'rename' option to include 'facilitator'. If you use this at the start of the name, then alphabetical sorting of names will mean all the facilitators are together, making things easier for whoever is putting together the breakout groups.
There may be other roles in your team which are helpful to know. In a recent hybrid meeting, we also had interpreters, who not only used 'INT', but also put the languages they were interpreting between, e.g. Fr/Eng or Sp/Eng.
In that meeting, we asked online participants to rename themselves to add the languages they were comfortable working in, which helped us create appropriate breakout groupings.
Another option online is to supply a branded background for the team, in a format which they can use as a virtual background. If there is also a 'client team', make sure the independent facilitators have a different background, to reinforce their independence from the client organisation.
What have you used, and are there circumstances in which you wouldn't want to identify facilitators in this way?