FluxxFest 2020 — How we redesigned our Company Day into a memorable virtual experience.
Each year we take a few days away from client work to reconnect with one another and talk about how the business will grow. This year our annual company day was reimagined as FluxxFest; a virtual experience where Rona-Retros, Star Gazing Sessions and Explorer Clubs were all on the line up. We were inspired by the work we’ve been doing with our clients to totally reimagine digital events and conferences, some of which is award winning! Last week Bupa’s virtual event series, ‘What Now. What Next.’ that we worked together on, won Best Webinar Series at the Health Insurance and Protection Awards. We wanted to create something equally engaging for our Fluxxers.
We thought we’d share with you some of our secrets to running brilliant digital events with a rundown of how we designed and delivered FluxxFest.
The challenge: To create a memorable moment of togetherness in a virtual setting — to reflect, reconnect and reset as one team for future growth.
What we did: Used our design thinking approach and some classic Fluxx tools to design a virtual festival. We’re customer centric designers, so in true Fluxx fashion we did our research, gathered intel and created sessions around the needs of our audience and our business objectives. We also spent time thinking about the user experience — spoiler alert; it’s all in the planning.
Top Tips for planning a virtual event:
- Be careful of becoming Zoom-zombies with too much time spent online and bake in ample break time
- Make each and every session as interactive as possible to keep everyone engaged
- Treat it like a normal company day, put your OOO on and close your emails
- Get the right balance of fun, energetic, silly sessions and quiet, reflective and open moments
Here’s a flavour of some of the sessions we designed for the lineup:
WTF Just Happened? We kicked off with a look back over the past 6 months and find out what our Fluxxers had been getting up to. We gathered intel in advance and designed an interactive session to share where we all were, what we were doing and what we’ve been missing about each other.
The Rona-retro. Using the agile retrospective format and one of our favourite tools,
, we split into groups and reflected on our individual lockdown experiences; we talked about what we enjoyed, what we found challenging and the things we wanted to take forward.
Welcome to the Future (of Work). Time to design the future of work for Fluxx with a workshop using design thinking methodology to frame the problem and design the solution. Ahead of the session we asked Fluxxers to prioritise a list of problem statements based around remote working. In the workshop we split into 5 groups and each took a priority problem statement to unpick. We worked on some How Might We’s to frame the opportunity and used the Crazy 8’s exercise to rapidly ideate possible solutions. We left this session with a long list of ideas to improve our remote working experience and some are already in motion; so far we’ve set up local hub groups for Covid secure meetups, and a Makers WhatsApp group for the extra-curricular creatives.
Stargazing. We tested and stretched Zoom to the user limits by having three parallel, rotating Stargazing sessions; this was a chance to talk through our future Business, Personal and Commercial growth plans in smaller groups.
FluxxTalks. We included a moment for Fluxxers to sit back and listen with an inspirational talk from Art of Brilliance speaker, Jonathan Peach. He talked to us about positive psychology, how we should have a to-be list instead of a to-do list and the power of choosing your mood.
Explorer Club. We made sure we had plenty of social time to recreate our Fluxx hang outs with the choice of 4 different classes — an illustration class, an escape room, a wine tasting and a cooking class.
Our goal was to bring Fluxxers together after 6 months apart and create a sense of closeness that we would usually have at an ‘in real life’ company day. It needed to be a memorable experience that would leave everyone feeling positive and connected as a group — and we did it!
If you’d like to chat about how we designed the experience, drop me a line at annabel.staib@fluxx.uk.com.
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