New format: Week of Learning

Trainings and education was always important at Jimdo. We do this since a while. I always had the idea of doing something big, with impact and intensity in a compact context. Out of this idea evolved the format “week of learning - prepare for the future”. In this blogpost you get insights about this new format with its goals and content.

The concept. What is it?

The format “the week of learning” is one week of condensed learning. It is the biggest learning format at jimdo so far. So we really want to boost with this. See the program below.  

• inspirational talk in the beginning,
• eight trainings,
• lean coffee for the whole week,
• format “Jimdo-essentials” part I & II
• fishbowl discussion
• and of course a party at the end.

Goal. Why do we do this?

Our goal is to strengthen employees skills and knowledge about tools and essential knowledge in order to make work easier, better and more successful and fun. To reach this goal, we want to train and educate as many Jimdoes as possible in this week to enable them individually and as a whole. We want to move the needle when it comes to inhouse education.

Our different formats

We have one inspirational talk in the beginning by one of our founders. The idea behind this is to start with a transformational story, which widens the horizon and introduces into the week of learning.

We cover the following trainings: Goal setting, Conflict management, Decision making, Personal efficiency and Scribble to go. Each of these trainings are given by two trainers. All the trainings are given by the coaching team, one by two designers. The trainings contain a mixture of professional input, tools and exercises.

There is a fishbowl discussion combined with the results of our employee survey. We are driven by the thought, that a discussion about learnings and insights about the week combined with a discussion about our culture bring people closer together and let them learn from each other's experiences.

Our lean coffee over the whole week for one hour each day is our chance to be accessible during this week. Specially in this week we will be hard to encounter. With the lean coffee there is a guarantee that people can approach the coaching team.

Jimdo essentials is a new format where specialists give lightning talks about the 8 most important models and approaches towards our customers for the company right now. The idea came from Friedel, one of our founders. Every employee should have heard about certain models and concepts. It makes discussions easier, faster and our results more aligned and successful. As a nice side effect we can use this material for better and faster onboarding.

Due to the fact, that we integrated this big project in our normal schedule we needed to plan smart and have good alignment through the preparation phase. Therefore we created a project-kanban-board to be able looking at our visualized workflow as well as a roadmap with fix delivery-dates to see where we still have time and where to hurry. For us this mixture was helpful to keep a better overview, especially for our team-members who were not involved in the organization but still included in trainings.

We adjusted the plan here and there and came up with an agenda that would be tough and still viable.

We had two supporting factors that helped us:

One is definitely the support from our founders, which gives a boost to the format. The other factor are the many training registrations we had earlier this year, when we decided to start a registration program for our trainings. Much more people registered as we thought. With this in mind we had the chance to bring many of these people into the trainings they wanted to attend.

Learnings so far:

Preparation needs time, as well as organization. It takes much longer to really clarify who is on board with a specific topic. Having a room problem on a daily basis is an even bigger problem when you need that many rooms in one week. And not to forget, people definitely like the idea of this format and were excited to register. We got awesome feedback so far in the planning and preparation phase.

The next blog-article will be about the execution, the evaluation and feedback of the new format week of learning and it will be published as soon as possible.

read more interesting articles at improve.jimdo.com