The Made in Group held an Employee Engagement workshop earlier this month, a company innovation day, to improve productivity within the business and work on creating a collective culture that helps the business thrive.
The focus of the four-hour workshop was culture, productivity, technology, people, and processes. To get the team thinking about their role within the Made in Group and learn more about each other, MiG employees were asked to tell everyone ‘how they create value for Made’, ‘their most innovative product of last year’ and ‘what they would replicate from their previous employer.
This gave employees the opportunity to share their experiences in their role and think about what they have achieved over the past year, a positive way of highlighting the value of their individual job roles. Processes are an important part of any business for development and consistency, as the team mentioned what worked well in their previous employments, this particular exercise gave them the chance to think about their personal processes and implementing them in their day to day work routine.
Afterwards, the team took part in an exercise called collaborative sketching - an ideation technique where we use the universal language of drawing to upon each other's ideas. By doing this, it allows introverted people to express their thoughts, without extroverts unintentionally dominating the conversation. The exercise saw the team draw up a solution to a potential problem a business could face. For example one of the potential problems could be future-proofing the business. The team came up with an array of solutions, an example of collective intelligence. One of the responses was ‘the Made in Group should continue to innovate the offering to ensure we are always one step ahead of the competition.
MiG also held a workshop last year, with ideas implemented into the company's working process. This saw Corporate Social Responsibility days introduced, where employees have the opportunity to gain up to two more annual leave days when committing themselves to charity work at the weekend. In a bid to introduce healthy living, all members of the team were also given a Fitbit. On top of this, a challenge was set up on the Fitbit to calculate who gained the most steps within the team.
CEO and founder of the Made in Group, Jason Pitt, said that the workshop was also about inclusiveness in the workplace, which fits in well with MiG’s Made Equal campaign:
“An Employee Engagement Workshop is to be inclusive. Therefore by doing a task such as collaborative sketching, everyone has the opportunity to take part and have their say. For us to tap into collective intelligence, we need to include everyone in that. If you were to look at the Made platform, around 80% of those ideas are due to collective intelligence.”