Westfield Health’s Board Room… what a venue!

Reflections from our inaugural Juice Summit

Gary Butterfield
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

Last Wednesday saw our first Juice Summit, the culmination of month’s of work, and I’m delighted to say that it was a big success!

First though, a little context

Since it’s early days as an internal initiative at the University of Sheffield, Juice has always been about community. The question is, however; how do you continue to build that community when you’re no longer working with just one organisation, but a number of them spread across the country within multiple sectors?

What we wanted to achieve

To answer to this question was through a conference-style event, which was purely for our clients and partners. The purpose of the day was:

  1. To connect Juice leaders from the organisations we work with and share good practice
  2. To provide opportunities for continual keep learning, for personal and organisational benefit
  3. To be active in different ways and pick up other activity ideas that could facilitated for their own colleagues
  4. To allow the opportunity to take notice of what’s working well with Juice elsewhere, reflect on how we can build it going forward, and to discuss and critique our current development plan
  5. To give leaders the time and opportunity to create a supporting network from different kinds of organisations to increase Juice’s impact.

We had bold ambitions, but that’s the way it should be. For extra icing on the cake, Westfield Health were kind enough to lend us their Board Room for event. Their purpose-built offices in the centre of Sheffield are shy of two years old and very swish indeed!

The day’s events

We were delighted to invite three of our company partners, Tailored Thinking, Rest Bandit, and Westfield Health, to present to delegates. Each covered the latest thinking and research in positive psychology, challenged us on the quality of our “rest” periods, and ways that the health and wellbeing agenda has changed over recent years and where it’s likely to head in the future.

As part of the day, we wanted to give organisations the opportunity to share their Juice journeys, what had worked well, what had worked less well, and the direction that that they were planning to travel. The purpose of this was to reflect, inspire, and challenge, so we can all collectively create remarkable places to work with healthy and happy people.

The Summit also took it out of the office and into the city. Sheffield is a beautiful place, with warm, friendly people, and a small community big city vibe. Using the app, what3words, we set up a treasure hunt where delegates donned their smartphones and navigated to a destination. Once at that destination, they had a question to answer; only with the answer would I tell them their next destination. The activity took them to:

  • The Diamond Building
  • Sheffield Cathedral
  • Sheffield City Hall
  • The Crucible
  • Sheffield Winter Gardens
  • The Peace Gardens.

Finally, the afternoon was less about looking back, and more about looking forward. It was my privilege to share EJL’s development plans for Juice and to receive such positive reviews, and to invite those that we work with to tell us how we can all better support each other, with some key actions set there and then.

Next steps

Work has already begun on putting provisions in place for a broader Juice community of organisations, but I can’t tell you those because they’re top secret. We also have some strong development plans in place now so we can officially go to work, better servicing our clients and in turn further increasing their stirling engagement rates.

Last but not least, we’re going to run the Juice Summit again, likely in six months time once more organisations have launched Juice.

If you’re interested in investing in the health and wellbeing of your staff; get in touch.

Juice

We create remarkable places to work with healthy and happy people.

Gary Butterfield

Written by

Yorkshire lad, tea lover, Cheese at Everyday Juice Limited, HR, Unsplash photographer, rugby league old boy, weightlifter, marathoner, cyclist, and Ironman.

Juice

Juice

We create remarkable places to work with healthy and happy people.

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