A house group meeting is a great way to find out what the issues are for cleaners. And it is a great way to get organised, identify and develop leadership and take action for change. Below is more information to help you organise a successful house meeting.

Who should attend?

Please invite between five and twelve cleaners. They could be members of your union or organisation, or people you invite to participate from outside.

Roles

Allocate roles: a facilitator, a time-keeper and a record keeper.

The facilitator holds the space and makes everyone feel comfortable and welcome. They ensure everyone has a chance to speak and may encourage people by asking questions or follow-up questions. They open and end the meeting (see below).

The time-keeper monitors time and informs the facilitator. If everyone is asked to share a story within a time frame, the time-keeper holds each speaker to account.

The record-keeper makes notes in the form below and records participants’ details. The notes do not need to be ‘minutes’ but just one or two lines to remember what each person has shared. It will help to identify the commonly recurring themes.

Procedure

A house meeting usually lasts from 60 minutes to 90 minutes.

It can be online or face-to-face depending on the best way to engage people and the Covid advice/regulations at the time.

Getting started

The facilitator welcomes people and states the aim of the meeting for example:

“Welcome to our house group meeting. We are running this as part of a listening campaign that aims to speak to 500 cleaners about the issues they care about and want to change in their work. We are part of a coalition of groups who represent cleaners or support cleaners working together to change cleaning for the better.”

Facilitator then invites everyone to introduce themselves (stating name, where they work and something they’d like to share about themselves - it could be a hobby, languages spoken, something they’ve done recently etc.).

After the round of introductions, the facilitator explains that the information that people give in the meeting will be used to gather anonymised data and stories, and checks for consent from everyone for their information to be used in that way. You may want to record the session if everyone is happy with that (this will only be used for internal purposes).

Sharing stories and experiences

The facilitator then asks everyone to answer the same question. For our Listening Campaign we suggest the question: “What is the biggest work issue affecting you, your colleagues or those close to you?”. You then ask each person to answer in turn with 3 minutes to speak each.

The key is ensuring that people listen to each other respectfully and don’t interrupt, and that everyone has a chance to share.

When people are sharing you want to ensure that people are being specific about the issues they encounter so that we can understand the crux of the issue. It is also good to encourage people to share stories so that you can start to draw out potential powerful testimonies that could drive the campaign’s communications. In order to ensure people are being specific and sharing stories, it is good for the facilitator to answer the rounds question first and model what you are looking for.

Discussion

Once everyone is shared, if you have time, you could go back to some of the issues raised and see if they are issues that other people have in common. This way you can get a sense of how widely felt some of the issues are.

You may also want to ask people what they have tried to do about the issue. This allows you to start identifying potential leaders in the group, who may already be organising in their workplace.

Next Steps and Close

Once time is drawing to an end it’s time to close the meeting. The facilitator thanks everyone for attending and acknowledges that it can hard to share experiences in public. They remind everyone that this is not a focus group type thing where professionals/politicians now try to fix problems (or ignore them) but that these issues will only be resolved through collective action, and that action will depend on them as much as anyone else. As a result, it is good to leave people with a next step to do. At this stage we are looking for people to help in reaching more cleaners, so a good next steps is to ask them if they know of other cleaners experiencing work issues, and if so whether they could encourage them to fill in the survey, or interview them, or invite them to a house meeting.

To close the meeting, it can be nice to do a rounds to close where everyone says a feeling they have at the end of the meeting. This can help to give feedback to others and to leave (difficult) feelings in the space.