What a great day! My experience of the FDM Group Employee Experience Hackathon

Luke O'Mahoney
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

Reflections on the FDM Group Employee Experience Hackathon, Thursday 6th July 2017…

Wow! What a fun, inspiring and innovative day that was! It was fantastic to go ‘analogue’ for the day and see what ideas can be created using old school instruments (pens, paper, post-its… brains) in a new school format, the “Hackathon”.

I have to admit that for me the “Hackathon” was a new experience but one that I thoroughly enjoyed and will certainly be trying to replicate in the future. The success of the event in no small part down to the charismatic and energetic facilitation by Perry Timms. Perry really knows how to create an environment for creativity!

Thanks also must go to Lara Plaxton for arranging the event on behalf of the FDM Group and for sharing some of her personal insights to kick off the day. Lara was followed by a very informative talk from Lesley Giles of The Work Foundation, framing the discussions of the rest of the day excellently.

So what did I learn? Apart from the fact that post-it notes are still very much alive and sticking…

The first thing I took away from the Hackathon was not directly related to employee experience (or maybe it is?) which is the power of ‘unplugging’. How often do we enter meetings with our laptops, tablets and smart phones or any of the multitude of tools of mass distraction? In my case, almost always. Today we all entered the room with only our minds and a willingness to collaborate. The result was some really great solutions to some very real challenges. Some of which I know members of the group were heading back to their respective businesses to implement.

Maybe you could think about “unplugging” your meetings OR maybe having “Digitox” days to encourage more open communication, innovation and unrestricted mind space — Check out Mark Ellis and his book titled “Digitox” for more on this idea and the benefits of a digitox at home as well as work.

Back to Employee Experience — Unsurprisingly the big words of the day were “Purpose” and “Value”. Crucially though, this was not an exercise of buzzword bingo, but an intellectual exploration of what these words mean in real terms and how to practically take action to promote both.

I will focus on the table which I was part of where we had a specific exploration on organisational culture. We started with a tsunami of post-it notes that seemed to engulf the table with words reflecting our interpretation of what constitutes ‘good’ organisational culture. We quickly established this was not overarching and would of course be different in almost all instances.

For this purpose however, we stripped this back to 6 key words and phrases surrounding a central focus on Purpose — Measurability, Authentic, Aligned, People Lead, Evolving and Visible.

This formed the basis of our hack of organisational culture which culminated in the design of a hypothetical tech platform and possible gamification programme to help map purpose from an individual perspective and then identifying the trends across the business to establish what is valued and purposeful from an organisational perspective. Worth noting that at Hudson our Talent Management team already help organisations with mapping to identify and articulate their organisational culture so do ask me if this is of interest to you.

We then talked about ways to encourage purposeful interaction and what could be done to enable a more fulfilling employee experience. We came up with the notion of “Franchising the workforce”… What on earth is that, I hear you asking! Well, let me explain.

What we meant by this was establishing an environment conducive to ‘flatocracy’ and project style working where your value as an individual contributor is shared between multiple project groups rather than singularly aligned to function. Each project team essentially given autonomy to run and operate their way (within sensible legal parameters).

In the same way as individual outlets of say Costa Coffee function independently from the overarching business but maintain conformity to brand standards, whilst also having the freedom establish sub-culture. This can be possible within organisations but instead of outlets, you have project teams — All operating autonomously but within the common shared purpose of the wider organisation.

The central theme for this model was trust and empowerment — Through trust and empowerment employee experience is exponentially increased and heightens the feeling of ownership, belonging and fosters a culture of collaboration.

This is just a snapshot of the ideas discussed today and only really takes into account the table which I was contributing to. Some of the other groups hacks included a complete disruption of the workplace including an outright ban on emails for internal communication, right through to a social platform to rival Linkedin! for matching organisational purpose to candidate purpose (this hack had a feel of Yourfeed to it — so check out their work if you haven’t already! Very cool).

All in all, what a fantastic day! I can’t wait for my next Hackathon and would encourage you all to look out for one near you and/or speak to Perry about the great work he does.

A final thanks to Lara and the FDM Group for organising the event and for my invitation to come along and take part in their Employee Experience Hackathon :)

Contact Me

0207 187 6206–07507 512 809 — luke.omahoney@hudson.com

Written by

Investor in people. Determined to put the ‘human’ back in #humanity. Currently helping organisations tackle the #NewWorldofWork at @HudsonRPO #BeHuman

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