How Canva trained 800 employees to fuel a $6 Billion growth spurt

Facilitation

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Facilitation

Set expectations with the facilitators of your program.

Who are our Facilitators?

The facilitators we have at Canva are passionate and motivated to deliver great learning experiences to their learners. They are cultural ambassadors, subject matters and people looking to develop their skills in presentation, facilitation and communication. We believe that anyone can be a facilitator so long as they have that motivation to share their knowledge, a drive to improve the experience they deliver to their learners and a love of connecting with people.

Facilitator Training

Before any facilitator takes on a session, they'll receive support from Canva University depending on the timeframe they have between when they need to take over a session.

At the baseline: they'll receive resources around the expectation that we have for them when delivering their learning experience and any tips or tricks to incorporate within their session. If time permits, they will be scheduled with a subject matter expert or someone who has facilitated a similar session in the past for a handover (To be used when new facilitators have 1-2 days before they facilitate)

At a medium level: they'll receive an in person session delivered by

@Lola Tseudonym⁠

around Facilitating Groups or

@Felix Marlin⁠

‘s Facilitator Bootcamp to go through an in-depth analysis of the skills required to be an effective facilitator. Facilitators will also then shadow a session run by the current facilitator of that session to understand the flow of the session and the content. They'll then facilitate themselves with the current facilitator giving them feedback and eventually takeover the session or alternate with the current facilitator (To be used when new facilitators have two weeks or more before they facilitate)

At a high level: they'll be enrolled in a Facilitation Program – they'll receive all the training from the first two options but have even more support in the form of consistent check ins with a facilitation coach like

@Lola Tseudonym⁠

and additional training sessions around finding their facilitation superpower, troubleshooting challenging solutions, building their confidence, working through their anxiety, reviewing videos of themselves facilitating. (To be used when new facilitators are especially passionate about facilitation and want to commit themselves to this learning program)

No matter what the situation, we want to provide support to our first time facilitators just as we would with our mentors, newbies and coaches. We believe that the success of our facilitators relates directly to the success of our programs and the success of our learners. The more we can help facilitators create an environment where they can empower, inspire and engage learners, they more we benefit.

Assessing Performance

We use the IBSTPI framework for establishing the baseline competencies of our facilitators. This framework splits facilitation across the five categories listed below.

IBSTPI Framework – Evaluating Facilitator Performance

Professional Foundations

Planning and Preparation

Instructional methods and strategies

Assessment and Evaluation

Management

Communicate effectively

Update and improve one's professional knowledge and skills

Comply with established ethical and legal standards

Establish and maintain professional credibility

Plan instructional methods and materials

Prepare for instruction

Stimulate and sustain learner motivation and engagement

Demonstrate effective presentation skills

Demonstrate effective facilitation skills

Demonstrate effective questioning skills

Provide clarification and feedback

Promote retention of knowledge and skills

Promote transfer of knowledge and skills

Assess learning and performance

Evaluate Instructional effectiveness

Manage an environment that fosters learning and performance

Manage the instructional process through the appropriate use of technology

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Methods for Measuring Performance

Methods for Measuring Performance

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Managing our Facilitator Pool

To ensure that we have enough facilitators for each of our programs, we'd ideally have a facilitator pool for each session with 4 people that have all been trained in the content of the session and basic facilitation principles. This will then be rotated and the level of training a facilitator receives will largely be determined by the content they are delivering based on the characteristics of a session. If it's consequential and irreversible then a higher level of training would be required to ensure messaging and facilitation standards are aligned. If the content is reversible and inconsequential then a lower level of training would be required and messaging since messaging and facilitation can be more flexible after the base levels of facilitation are achieved.

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Becoming a Facilitator

In order to ensure that we have enough people in our facilitator pool, we need to encourage the rest of Canva to volunteer themselves. This means we have to advertise this as a way of development to all our coaches at Canva so that they can guide their coachees during their growth and development chats. This might mean that Canva University needs to explicitly create pathways for this to become clearer in our organisation.

Next steps:

Map out the different levels for facilitator support we give out to people

Advertise to coaches that we need more facilitators

Create feedback form for facilitators to send out (depending on what process we go with to identify facilitator performance)

Communicate to facilitators our new changes: we're now measuring performance against these standards, providing support in the form of the three levels of training, recording their sessions for them to review

Facilitation – How does this apply to you?

Facilitation – How does this apply to you?

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👉 Next:

Pre & Post Learning⁠

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