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How we worked at the organisation
The organisation of the event started with why we were feeling the need to organise it, and what we wanted to achieve through it - everything followed: list of attendees and guests, high level design of the schedule, length, location, choice of venue, tools, tone, name and visual identity, values of the event, and way of working at the organisation.
Once the high level goals and budget were defined by the executives sponsoring the initiative we (more about “we” in a moment) enjoyed great autonomy in designing the event, and we intentionally created room for autonomy also for the attendees. What a feeling!
Core team
My colleague Federica and I were at the core of the organisation. Working in pair gave us the opportunity to easily bounce off ideas and get immediate feedback, to be resilient in the face of change and unforeseeable events, and also gave each other a shoulder to lean on during the tough moments.
We were frequently communicating through Slack, and decided to have a half an hour daily video call to plan the work immediately ahead of us, discuss how to overcome impediments, and check what was done.
We oversaw different streams of work, based on our expertise and interests: she is the subject matter expert at organising events in the company and at internal communications, while I know the intended audience well, I’m passionate about designing interactions and participatory meetings, and I gained experience field over the years by joining different kinds of public conferences as attendee, volunteer, and speaker.
We also kept communication lines open with the execs through Slack, to discuss any strategic decision that had to be made along the way, and to answer their questions.
Committee
We were part of the broader committee behind the event: five people in total, taking care of plans and budget, logistics, management of the 3rd parties involved in the event (eg. the hotel, the photographer, the AV supplier), branding. While not everybody in this group is in charge of event management at the company, they already worked together at other internal events (all but me, and I am really grateful they let me in, because I’ve learned a lot), and the amount of expertise they built over the years has been a key factor in delivering quite a big event, and within the tight deadlines we had.
During the Camp, the committee was in charge of checking in attendees and guests at the venue, ensuring that everything needed was in place at the right moment, and solving any impediment along the way.
Within the group, Martin was also sustaining our energies and focus, by coaching the committee and facilitating their work, and by keeping attendees’ spirits high during the plenary sessions.
Also in this case, a dedicated Slack channel helped us stay in touch and check on things whenever we felt the need to.
We decided to meet once a week during the weeks leading to the event, and twice a day during the event, to double check in the morning that everything was ready, and to do a quick retrospective at the end of the day.
We organised our work through two sophisticated (kidding!) tools:
- A spreadsheet with the tasks to get the job done, with owners, any hard deadline, and priority (Now / Next / Later / On site)
- A slide deck with all the info about the event, and a fine-grained schedule listing for every day what was supposed to happen, when, where, from both the attendees and the organisers’ perspective
Transparency in the group greatly contributed to creating good teamwork, in my opinion: all documents and materials we worked on were shared, and even if we were taking care of separate things, we knew where to find info on everything.
Ambassadors and Volunteers
I wanted to foster active participation in the event at different levels, and I got the green light for involving around ten people from the intended audience in the organisation. We called this group ‘Ambassadors’.
When we sent out the invitations, far more than ten colleagues replied that they were keen to help out. ‘Ten’ was a number of people big enough to be representative of the population involved in the event, and small enough to cater for effective interactions.
When deciding which ten respondents were to be confirmed as ambassadors, the end goal I had in mind was to create the most diverse group. We ended up with a great mix: we had engineers, managers, architects, and product managers, people who joined the Company in 2022 and people who joined sixteen years ago, people from India, Germany, Italy, and Spain, just to provide some examples.
During our first meeting I kicked off by clarifying the purpose of the Ambassador in the context of the event:
- be the voice of our customers (aka our colleagues in Product and Technology), and act as a sounding board to let the committee know if the experiences that we were shaping were relevant and interesting enough for them
- increase awareness of the event in the teams, and bring back to the committee their questions, doubts, and feedback that weren’t reaching us directly
- lead or contribute to some streams of work.
Who applied to be Ambassador also had the opportunity to bail out, in case the tasks at hand weren’t something they could/would want to contribute to, and the criterion followed to assign them to the streams of work was…none: everybody decided how and where to contribute, based on their skills, interests, and capacity. As a result, their commitment was rock solid.
Managing the organisation among a larger group of people could have made it more complex and slower than necessary. At the same time, however, I was very keen to have people from the intended audience bringing their own perspective (nobody in the Committee was from Product or Technology). Also, I really wanted people to own the event, and allowing them to get their fingerprints on it was for me the way to go.
We went even further and asked if there was anyone open to volunteer during the event. Also in this case the response was overwhelming, as forty people replied “Count on me!”.
One of them at the end told me “I’m happy I could be there and contribute 0.01% to this success 🤗”
Professionals achieving a shared goal
What I love the most about this group of people who worked at different levels at the organisation is that there were no hierarchic lines determining the flow of our work. It was a group of professionals with different backgrounds, coming from different parts of the Company, each one with their own specific skill set, who rallied around a shared goal and a shared purpose, decided how to organise their work, and co-created something amazing.