Westminster Children's Society aims to support the children of low-income families and manages twelve children's centres providing high-quality, low cost childcare. Currently, it takes in more than 450 children, providing care, education and family support.
It is a high-energy, committed organisation, whose 90 staff usually take change in their stride – opening new facilities, dealing with endless new legislation, and taking on new employees and contracts, often for the local authority.
However, for its recent Organisational Training Day, June O'Sullivan, now new CEO for WCS, thought that with the amount of change in the organisation at the moment – including the departure of their current CEO - the employees needed some additional support.
“We wanted someone to take the employees through a more personal view of change, something apart from all the theory,” said June. “While we didn't want the employees to be scared by change, we did want them to think about the impact it might have on them personally. fe3 consulting was recommended to us and we asked them to help us.”
There was no doubt that the brief was a tough one – take 90 people through what is often a very personal, introspective and solitary process, make it fun, encourage teamwork, keep people motivated and enthusiastic and allow them to use their creativity, in one day, with a long lunch break. And with just two facilitators.
fe3 rose to the challenge. We enlisted the support of the 12 WCS team leaders and produced a document briefing them on their role in guiding and feeding back the team discussions to give us some extra arms and legs on the day. We also identified what sort of issues might come up.
On the day, we mixed individual exercises and group work, some time for quiet reflection and some fairly anarchic team activity. We based the personal reflection on a tried and tested personal change questionnaire which people completed on the day and asked participants to discuss in groups how they felt, and the implications for their team.
“I felt the exercises were just right,” said June. “Ours is not an organisation that sits quietly in a classroom setting – they need to be getting involved, doing things. The mixture of elements provided by Gary and Karen was completely appropriate for our audience.”
We did some “talky” bits – for people who hadn't been through the theory - and we let the participants also do their own talking – in groups or to the whole organisation. The groups developed their “hedgehog” (the Jim Collins' concept of what organisations are deeply passionate about, what they're good at and what enables them to make money) and, armed with a video camera, a prop box and a set of very tight time deadlines, they were asked to make a two-minute video to show the other groups what they felt. The presence of IT manager John Trow-Smith was vital to this part of the event, and fe3 worked with him on this, and much of the day, very closely.
The long lunch break proved to be invaluable at this stage, as videos were transferred from the cameras to the laptops. And, supplementing the adage that you shouldn't work with animals or children, we had some minor problems with the playback at first. But the device – aimed at showing all the participants the amount of shared purpose that was in the organisation, as well as getting away from the day to day and getting back to the core of what WCS is all about, AND having some fun - worked well.
The day was about building – building confidence and building commitment. The activities also built on one another.
The final exercise asked everyone to decorate a tee shirt on the front and the back – the back was about what would be left behind, identified as “danger signals” in the personal change questionnaire. The front was what they were going to do about it. At the end of the Organisational Training Day, the whole of WCS were involved in an unruly (and very funky) fashion show, team, by team, parading their personal commitment to change.
“The feedback has been very positive about the day,” said June. “We've had people telling us how the day brought their teams together and reminded them of our core purpose (our Hedgehog Concept). The whole thing was done with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of professionalism and we're very pleased. We're sure this thought-provoking and enjoyable day will have helped our staff cope with some of the very big changes which will be happening over the next six months.”