Securing Understanding, Engagement and Front-line Ideas

The Situation: Our client was about to take his 300-person, well-established organization in a new, multi-year strategic direction. We counselled him to hold employee-workshops to engage his staff/teams for feedback and input to the plan and extract their ideas to make the effort more successful (and/or roadblocks to watch out for!). The best information and ideas are always with your staff/teams.

Our client did not have the in-house resources to plan and run these workshops. We managed all.

Our work included:

• Designing the structure & nature of the workshops (length of time; # of attendees & table to extract the best information)
• Developing all materials & presentations
• Developing facilitators guide. Training table-facilitators
• Writing necessary communications & workshop invitations
• Running/facilitating all workshops
• Producing individual and collective workshop reports
• Compiling all results into executive report and presentation.

The Results: 

• The workshops yielded very positive feedback and understanding from employees on the strategic effort. Employees respected and valued being included in the planning of the CEO’s new strategic direction.
• Employees contributed helpful/valuable ideas (that the CEO was unaware of) which were leveraged in the writing of the new 3-year strategic plan.
• These workshops set a very important foundation for the CEO to continue updating and informing employees on the progress of the strategic initiative.