Last week, we held our first collaboration week of 2024. With our last event being December 2023, it felt like a long time since we’d had everyone on-site, so we were really excited to welcome our staff from around the UK, and to get stuck into some great workshops, team sessions & socials.
The Talent team work hard to ensure that each collaboration week is unique, and with our remote staff travelling up to Newcastle to spend time in the studio (some of them on a 6 hour train journey), we always strive to make sure that everyone’s time is well spent, which makes creating an exciting schedule of events a key task for the team.
Each quarter, we reach out to all employees to gain their thoughts on the previous collaboration week. With this feedback, we then start to brainstorm ideas and come up with suitable workshops, based on what people want to hear & learn more about during the next quarter.
Our Executive Directors, who head up each team within the business, are also key here, as they can then discuss these ideas with their individual teams to confirm the right people to host each session.
We always want to make sure that each workshop is valuable to those attending, but we feel that it is also important to allow everyone to build their own schedule around their day to day work, so we aim to have a good variety of open sessions.
These included a practical session showcasing our new streaming space, and how to use the equipment effectively. This is a new set up in our office, and includes equipment for high quality virtual calls, hosting webinars and doing customer demos.
We also held a full company update, from our CEO Darren, whilst enjoying delicious breakfast sandwiches from Doyles of Dean Street.
Other sessions included a presentation from Marketing Manager, Ben, who ran through our Marketing Strategy for FY25, a showcase of our newest product Omnistream, presented by CPO, Jason & Product Director, Ian. Plus a demo training session, where our Customer Success Managers, Jamie & Rich talked us through how they show our products to potential clients.
More team and account specific workshops were also held throughout the week, including retrospectives, account updates & various team meetings.
As part of our Developing You series of personal development workshops we also hosted an activity on the art of negotiation, run by our Exec Director Dave - which featured teams negotiating with each other for missing jigsaw puzzle pieces with varying degrees of success!
We ended the week with a social across the tyne at ‘By The River Brew’ who provided us with some amazing beer & wine, and tasty pizzas from Fire & Dough.
Plans are already underway for our summer collaboration week in June!