As a Human Resources professional, you like in a 365-day year. You might think it strange for me to point that out, but many other people do not. For example, event professionals in your company live a 3-day year (during the event, like the internal national sales meeting) and then a 362-day year (the year of prep for work the event).
This could be important to you for a couple of reasons. First, that event brings everyone together to focus on internal work for a few days, something that pretty much never happens otherwise. Second, that event may come with an event app, one that helps attendees manage their event experience, but also deliver content, train, and create connections.
The problem is that event people think about those three days as a year in and of itself, and you can can think about it as the kickoff for a host of programs for you. A second benefit? Those programs can leverge that exact same app to achieve ever greater results.
Let’s start with the first point, that you can treat these events not as opportunities for offsite training or strategic alignment, but as the beginning of something far bigger. Yes, an offsite event is a valuable tool, getting people out of their environments to attempt to shift pattens and behaviors, to get people out of their ruts to consider new ideas. The event can be designed to engaged and energize staff to do things differently. But at the end of the event, so many people aren’t able to carry that behavior shift back to the office. The intention to be more organized, to spend a little more time building connections between team members, to start every day with a walk around the sales floor (or whatever your idea was) falls apart as the day-to-day stresses of work come back.
But thinking of the event as the kickoff to a year-long campaign to acheive the same idea is a whole other beast. The event can launches the idea, delivers the training, and gives everyone an opportunity to consider the idea. But when they return from the event, instead of having it all fall out of their heads, everyone returns to the office, where you have already prepared the next step in the campaign. We’re not talking about motivational posters, but about weekly emails pre-designed and structured to keep the idea on everyone’s mind, to help people share successes, to develop social proof around the office about the importance of acceptance of the idea. Coming back to the office and seeing that everyone else is continueing to work towards the idea’s success pushes each person to play their part.
The campaign can have many channels. Beyond an email, maybe it becomes a game that takes place on the corporate intranet, giving points to those to create small wins in pursuit of the idea. Maybe it becomes a monthly lunch, or a quarterly office meeting for regions. Maybe it’s all of the above, as a multi-channel camapign always has more opportunities to convince people to continue puttting the work towards accomplishing the goal. Multiple communications touchpoints means more people onboard for longer.
And one of the most effective channels to engage employees and drive action towards your goal is to recycle that event app and turn it into an engagement app for your camapign.
Think of it. Your event team has already selected, implemented and populated the app with content. Then they promoted the app to your staff and trained them how to use it. All it takes is for you to re-purpose that exact same app for your own long-term ends. That app will probably allow you to push messages out to your staff on their phones, most people’s ost trusted and personal tech.It might have a built in social channel, one that will be used specifically for your campaign (think your existing intranet and social channel are enough? Go look how well used they really are) and is closed to non-staff. It might have a game or survey and polling tools. It might allow you to store camapign-related content. People can check in for virtual meetings.
And it’s already implemented and paid for. You just need to pick up these valuable and effective tools and use them.