Events done differently: Issue 3
Rob Woodhead
Commercial Director, outdoor lover, stoic thinker and experienced business leader.
Welcome to issue three of our newsletter!
Our last?newsletter?prompted one of our readers to get in touch, they asked a great question about annual or repeatable events. It's actually a relatively common issue, so we're tackling that challenge today.
One of the problems that we find when speaking to comms and marketing professionals is around repeatable annual events. In a lot of cases, these events run simply “because they always have done” without getting to the crux of the?why. Why do they exist? What value do they bring to the business?
So what can you do to help reinvent these annual events to make them more memorable, add more value, and bring about real behavioural change for your colleagues and customers?
We've put together our top four tips and tools, including the Good Grief model shown below, to help you add more value to those annual events.
If you'd like to discuss this in more detail, or anything else for your event planning journey please get in touch and we can start a conversation.
We hope you enjoy this month's edition!
Join us for simplybetter live
Recognition: The power of moments and emotions to drive engagement
Wednesday 12th July 10.00-11.00am UK
Join us for our latest live webinar, we're exploring the significance of Reward and Recognition within the workplace and how the trends around recognition events are changing. We will discuss the importance of curating the right emotions to drive recognition, engagement, performance, and profitability using Psychology and Behavioural economics. Plus we'll explore why events play such a fundamental part in any recognition strategy.
We'll also touch on integrating this approach into your customer base, using recognition to build brand loyalty across colleagues and customers.
The power of environments
Put simply, environmental psychology explores the relationship between people and the environments they are in. It examines how environments (natural or built) shape us as individuals, and emphasises how environments change human experiences and behaviours.
When it comes to planning any event, we implement all sorts of science, theory and psychology but in this article, we focus on just one element – that of environmental psychology and the amazing power it has to trigger emotions, good and bad!
OMG! The first crucial step in events planning
The compound effect of Covid, Brexit, Ukraine and the rising cost of living means that this generation is facing more uncertainty than at any point in their life so far. If you apply that to a business context, this uncertainty will often lead to a battening down of hatches and the slashing of any expenditure deemed unnecessary.
The result is more pressure than ever on budgets and an increasing emphasis not only on delivering but also demonstrating real value and return on investment.
So, we're sharing our simplybetter tips on how to reframe those stakeholder conversations and change their perception from ‘event spend’ to ‘engagement spend’ and the part that events play in the wider business strategy.
Bettys & Taylors
The Challenge
We were asked to help BTG create an unforgettable event that brought their people back together following the pandemic to reconnect them with the business and celebrate colleague successes.
The Solution
After sitting down with the Bettys team to understand their main objectives, we helped them select the perfect venue to host the event and then it was time for the creative team to take the lead. We developed creative concepts, visualised them for the Betty's team, and then brought our ideas to life on-site. The space was designed around a central stage to ensure award winners had maximum exposure, and colleagues were close to the action. From street food stalls to gin bars, and garden games to a live saxophonist, we had every base covered to make sure that colleagues had a night to remember!
领英推荐
The Results
"It was absolutely fantastic! People around the business are still talking about it three weeks on! The atmosphere was electric and it more than delivered the objectives of getting everyone together to reconnect, say a great big thank you and for people to let their hair down and have a good old knees up."
"Your team did an absolutely awesome job – we couldn’t have asked for more. Thank you for working so well with us to deliver our vision!"?
Team member spotlight
We often talk about the simplybetter family and we thought you might like to get to know them a little better...
First up we have our awesome Creative Artworker, Rich Moffatt !*
*sadly these highly collectable top trumps cards haven't been printed yet, but we might if you ask us nicely!
Macmillan Mighty Hike
On Saturday 1 July, 11 of our simplybetter team are taking part in the Macmillan Mighty Hike.
Macmillan Cancer Support?is a charity very close to our hearts after one of our team was unfortunately diagnosed with bowel cancer in March 2021.
See Abbie’s story below.
If you would like to sponsor the team and donate to a fantastic cause, please click here. The team taking on the walk are grateful for all donations, no matter the size.
Convincing your CEO that colleague engagement is justified
90,000 hours of our lives are spent at work – that’s over a 1/3 of your life! When it comes to the workplace, we believe people have a right to be at their happiest whilst they’re there.
At simplybetter, our purpose is to?make people’s lives better?through the interactions we have and the experiences we create – whether that be for our colleagues, our clients, or the audiences that attend the events and experiences we create.
There’s an integral link between employee experience and employee engagement.?Employee experience is all about what people observe and encounter over the course of their time at any given company they work for – basically, it’s what they think, feel and see whilst they’re there. This needs to be viewed as a lifecycle - starting by attracting the right candidates, through to the recruitment and onboarding process, development opportunities, performance management, reward and recognition, and even perhaps exiting the business.
The quality of this experience will have a direct impact on the levels of?employee engagement, i.e. the level of enthusiasm and dedication a colleague feels toward their job and the company, as a result of their experience working there.
We know that businesses with engaged workforces benefit from:
So the correlation between employee engagement and better bottom line business results is also inextricably linked.
Simply put, better colleague engagement leads to better business results.
But what if you’re right at the start of this journey? What if you get all of the above, but you’re just not sure where to start or how to implement some of this stuff.
The key is to focus on?progression over perfection. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to improve one thing by 100%, so instead focus on improving 100 things by 1%. The secret to getting results that last is to continue to make small improvements consistently and focus on maintaining a positive moving average.
It’s a cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement, and your commitment to this process will ultimately determine your progress.
So my advice is just start! Don’t worry if it’s not perfect – it never will be. But just ask yourself what’s the one action you can take today, that will start the ball rolling.
All the best,
Rob Woodhead
Managing Director