Workshops and Conferences
Many organizations use workshops, seminars and conferences within the organizational change process, as instanced above. A workshop is a planned and facilitated event, usually involving between eight and twenty people, and lasting from two hours to a full day. Conferences are larger events, usually involving between 50 and 200 participants.
Workshops and conferences can be used to:
- Impart information
- Gather information
- Deepen understanding
- Persuade
- Make decisions
- Solve problems.
Workshops and conferences can be used to address a wide range of issues in the workplace:
- Explaining organisational changes such as new structures
- Seeking to build support for these changes
- Getting ideas and information from a wide spectrum of staff and managers to help develop organisational strategies
- Securing commitment to a plan or course of action, e.g. a new sales strategy for a sales team
- Obtaining ideas and information from particular occupational groups as part of a training needs analysis
- Informing people about a change of ownership of the organisation
- Explaining and promoting early retirement and voluntary redundancy schemes
- Gathering data from a cross-section of an organisation as part of an organisational review
- Assessing the potential of a new product or service
- Evaluating the success of a new product or service
- Having an in-depth discussion about a particular issue or problem with a view to solving it
- Improving communications to and from employees
- Reviewing the development of a team or group
The facilitator usually has several roles:
- To help design the event so that the organizers' objectives may be achieved
- To manage the event, including discussions and any problems that might arise on the day.
- To present findings if there has been research conducted that needs to be validated and discussed
- To produce written reports.
Where there are a significant number of events to be organized we contract in specialist event managers to organize and administer these.