Some of the team at Webbiz are qualified workshop facilitators, and most have experience in running and taking part in internal and client workshops. We use them to find our best ideas and align everyone on the chosen approach.
We’ve found workshops more productive, enjoyable, and efficient than meetings, and we’d like to share some of our findings with you here.
First, what is a workshop?
Workshopping is a term used in many industries to describe slightly different things. Still, essentially it’s a group of people coming together with a specific goal to discuss and improve something before sharing it with the world.
Most people have meetings at work to achieve this goal, and that’s where the workshop comes in. They’re better than meetings because they are designed to combat the common issues arising from workplace meetings, such as team politics, unbalanced knowledge, and different problem-solving approaches.
A meeting (or series of meetings) can be unfocused with no tangible outcome. Some more vocal team members can dominate, and shyer members fade into the background.
A workshop puts a structure in place to ensure that each participant contributes equally. The system ensures that the best ideas emerge as the chosen ones (not the idea that the most authoritative/loudest/senior member insists upon). And workshops are efficient. The process ensures that the ‘decision maker’ is taking part, meaning that the selected idea at the end of the workshop will be chosen and implemented – not rejected later down the line.
For example, a 1-hour workshop could be enough to bring a cross-functional team together, brainstorm ideas, select the best ideas democratically, and have the key decision-maker approve the idea.
How many long meetings would it take to achieve something like that? The workshop is the most efficient and powerful way to find and start working on the best ideas.
Why workshops work for our clients
We find the best ideas
A structured way to invite ideas from a cross-functional team with different personalities (some comfortable with contributing and others requiring more encouragement and an opportunity to contribute without a spotlight) ensures we have more ideas.
Then, our workshop process is designed to review the ideas as a team, test them against our client’s brief and business objectives, and ultimately guarantee that we have selected the best idea for our client.
We save our clients time and money
Coming up with ideas and discussing them back and forth until a team finds the approved concept is incredibly time-consuming. Let’s meet next week to discuss this. And the outcome of that meeting is another meeting the following week to discuss different ideas.
That’s not our way. We run workshops with a clear goal, and each stage of the workshop is designed to achieve that goal. It’s focussed and target driven, with plenty of space for creativity and inspiration. Workshops aren’t a dry, structured process. It’s incredibly dynamic, and ideas are found and approved in a fraction of the time they would have if worked on in isolation and discussed in a series of meetings with different people at a time.
We focus on alignment
Whether internal-only or client participation, we always reach alignment through our workshops. The process and structure guarantee that, and it’s one of the critical factors.
A meeting doesn’t guarantee alignment. It can be chaotic, unfocussed, and unfair. How often have you been in a meeting where the most vocal person has pushed their idea through with most of the room remaining silent?
The workshop considers everyone equally through the creative and decision-making steps. And then finally, the decision maker is present in the workshop, ensuring that the aligned path is sure to be implemented.
Suppose the decision maker wasn’t in the room? The idea is vulnerable after the workshop ends, open to the decision maker overruling the team’s efforts. We won’t let that happen. We work through winning ideas that become reality.
See the Power of Workshops
It’s really that simple. We find the best ideas that everyone is aligned upon, and we save our clients time and money. If your business feels the need to find better ideas, whether creative or strategy based, and optimise your processes, we can help you.
The potential of workshopping is unlimited. They can be implemented in place of any meeting. It would help if you experienced one to see the actual value of it, but we hope this post has given you enough insight to be interested in trying a Webbiz workshop out yourself.