Experience. It’s worth the investment. Experience distinguishes one product and company from another and one outcome from another. In large part, experience is tied to perception. Perception is the intangible feeling that something has value because of the way that thing is presented. Together, perception and experience are important factors in telling ourselves the story of what is happening, and how we are processing information. In the workshop case, it is the way you make your participants feel.
Experience takes design, and workshop experience is no exception. Good workshop design is all about deciding how you’ll make your participants’ lives better and ensure workshop results meet your objectives. It means investing in quality, user-friendly methods, and innovating for optimal participant experience.
What does this look like?
At an employee engagement workshop Starfish Taylor hosted, we wanted to put participant experience at the forefront of our design. We wanted people invited and attending our workshop to feel different, special—like they were about to have an experience, not just “business-as-usual”.
In our case, our employee engagement workshops started with a special invitation, and ended with a little gift —“grow your own bean”. We chose this gift specifically as part of the workshop theme (another nod to continuity). Some of the feedback from people working in that particular office was that there were not enough plants, so we decided to give a little gift to allow people to take charge and help improve an area that they could do themselves. These were simple actions that improve how our participants felt about the workshop and the topic of employee engagement. So to make your next workshop excellent, we’d like to share some of our three basic tips with you:
- Make your invitation fun: Show of hands for those of you that have passed over yet another e-mail invitation in your inbox. There’s just so many. But when a special invitation—by post, by carrier pigeon, by cookie gram or singing telegram—shows up at your desk, you’re more likely to sit up and pay attention. It captivates you, and you want to know what it’s all about! With a well-designed workshop invitation, invitees’ curiosity is piqued and the tone of the event is set.
- Include a parting gift: Isn’t it fun to take something away from an experience—sometimes literally? An end-of-the-workshop gift can be both practical and part of the overall theme or it can be a symbol of what was discussed, and a reminder of the commitments and momentum made at the workshop. In this case, it was both! Our little plant both contributed to the office greenery and serves as a reminder to keep employee needs in company discussion.
- Incorporate feedback: This puts the participant experience at the forefront of the design. In our experience, asking for customer feedback also gives Starfish Taylor the opportunity to know what we did right, and what we can do better! We can keep tweaking our user-friendly model based on feedback to keep the workshop experience fresh and optimal.
Workshops can be run-of-the-mill, but who wants that? At Starfish Taylor, we believe that optimising the experience can help people to get more out of it. As an added bonus, for the employee engagement topic, we felt the design of the workshop and the topic itself went hand-in-hand—we were able to improve employee engagement simply by making sure their workshop and meeting experience were memorable.
