Our ‘Great companies, great stories’ series, shines a light on organisations getting it right with their people. Whilst many organisations put their teams’ away days on hold during the Covid crisis, The People Development team at EDF embraced the challenge. We worked together to find a new, creative, and fun way to bring their people together, to reflect on the year so far and set plans for the future.
We catch up with Learning Event Manager, Amy Gillard to look back on the 2020 ‘Impact Festival’ – a virtual festival of work.
Hi Amy – so lovely to see you again. Would you be able to start by talking us through where the idea of the ‘Impact Festival’ came from?
The People Development meet face to face for two days, three times a year. These are important touch points where we review performance, projects, celebrate successes and look at ways we can improve.
With Covid, we had a challenge to think about how we could still reflect, review and plan, but without having that time face-to-face. We knew it would need to happen virtually – but we’ve all spent a lot of times on video calls recently, so how could we make it engaging and still get our messages across for almost 50 people?
We spoke to People Lab and when someone mentioned the idea of making it a virtual festival, we took the idea and ran with it!
I’ll be completely honest, some of us were nervous about whether or not it would work – we’ve never done anything like this before, but our Director, Ingo, encouraged us to go for it, try something new, because it could be great…and it was!
We set up two half day sessions, and created an online festival, covering all the different items we would normally fit into our away day.
Ahhh we loved it too! Can you tell our readers about some of the ways the event was themed?
Well, we tried to keep to the festival theme as much as possible. Our communications ahead of the event were designed as interactive tickets, and we invited everyone to dress up or down, whether that was full festival chic with glitter et al, or just wearing their favourite band t-shirt. Our sessions were named after famous stages or areas at festivals – like the pyramid stage for our headline acts and the healing fields for our wellbeing session. We also had several breaks throughout the festival, and in those we’d play classic festival performances. We also had a non-alcoholic cocktail making session (mocktails). We’d sent out the ingredient list ahead of the day, and anyone could join in – it was a nice way for us to all have a drink together, plus the ‘bartender’ from within the team was brilliant, so it was very funny!
So, how did the tech work for you?
We used Zoom and Miro boards, which meant we had loads of capability to do different things and keep up engagement. With Zoom we were able to set polls, play videos and split the group into smaller breakouts – this was really important, as we had nearly 50 people dialling in. Having smaller groups at different points, meant more could have their say and collaborate – plus we tried to mix up the groups at times too, so people could work with different groups throughout the event. It was our first-time using Miro too. Miro is a fantastic collaboration tool – a bit like a virtual whiteboard, but better! We can add sticky notes, mind map and more on there – and then we pdf the outputs to share and reflect on after the event.
Miro is great – it’s so useful to be able to still collaborate this way when it’s online.
So overall, the event was a success? Were there any particular highlights for you?
The feedback was great – the team rated the event and the hosts really highly. It was great fun and we all really appreciated being back together – even though it wasn’t in the same room! We asked the team to rate the sessions too, and there were a real mix of favourites – I really liked the ‘Open Mic’ session, where we got to hear volunteers share personal stories of how the crisis had affected them – but I know from a practical point of view, our session planning for the future was really important too.
It’s definitely changed the way we think about what’s possible with online events – and while we hope to return to some sort of normality, it’s great to be able to have these options open to us, allowing us to bring people together, no matter where they are in the world.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you design a great digital experience, download our free digital EXperience brochure, or get in touch – we love to talk
