Facilitator…or work "party planner"?
A recent Financial Times article suggested that some companies are now relying on ‘party planners’ to keep hybrid and remote employees engaged with the office and the organization. But if you look below the surface of this idea, you can see facilitation is really at work here.
As post-pandemic work practices continue to evolve, some companies are switching more firmly toward hybrid and remote working. They’re letting go of rigid ‘attendance days,’ such as requiring everyone to be in the office from Tuesday to Thursday, and instead asking what problems they’re trying to solve by bringing people together.
Zillow case study
One example is the online property listing company Zillow. It’s reduced overall numbers of offices and thus increased the prevalence of remote working. At Zillow, 73% of employees work remotely (they’re not associated with a physical office) and only 2% are office-based (80-100% of their time in office).
Beginning in 2022, Zillow developed ‘zRetreats,’ gatherings that bring teams together for well-planned engagement. These activities have shown Zillow that team leaders frequently don’t have the skills needed to design and run successful workshops and retreats.
Zillow has added facilitators (the ‘party planners’) to help design and deliver events, as well as analyse the results and refine the approach. After several years focussing on sessions for individual teams, Zillow is now developing zRetreats that connect people across teams and functions.
Why team leaders might need help
Team leaders might need help designing retreats and workshops for several reasons--some reasons they might acknowledge, but others they might not be aware of. For example, 71% of senior managers admit that meetings are unproductive. The Harvard Business Review reports that ‘leaders consistently rate their own meetings very favourably—and much more positively than attendees do.’
At the same time, employees confronted with a number of poor-quality meetings see them as a time suck, perhaps understandably, and use meetings to do other work. Sometimes meeting participants have to spend time ‘recovering’ from very bad meetings (for example letting off steam with work friends).
Most team leaders won’t have the skills to step back from day-to-day work or KPIs to properly scope a workshop or retreat. They don’t have awareness of the many different activities and exercises available to engage people and draw out creativity, and they don’t have experience with alternative ways of working (including Lego Serious Play and other methods) that get the best out of workshops. Finally, in many cases they or their staff assigned to run the session, are simply too close to the team to bring a fresh experiences or question ‘the way we’ve always done it.’
Other benefits of flexible work combined with facilitation
Zillow and other companies’ experiences show that if you can hit the right combination of flexibility with remote or hybrid working and well-designed, periodic intentional gatherings, you get additional benefits. Zillow found that reduced costs for office space more than offset investment in travel and facilitation associated with zRetreats. Remote working has attracted a higher overall number of applicants, and from a more diverse applicant pool. Staff retention is higher and productivity has often improved.
Are you making the most of intentional gatherings?
While your organisation may not be as fully remote as Zillow, if it embraces hybrid work, there’s a good chance you’re not making the most of your intentional gatherings. A facilitator can help you create ‘hard fun’ that brings results by keeping the group constructively challenged and in a state of ‘flow.’ You can apply this to:
creating new ideas/solution (e.g. see posts ‘seeing through new eyes’ or ‘fire up workshop sessions’)
aligning strategy or values (e.g. see post ‘converge or diverge’)
experimenting with new ways of thinking (e.g. see post ‘different thinking styles’)
or meeting people/getting to know people better (e.g. see post ‘the red carpet’)
I keep coming back to that quote: ‘leaders consistently rate their own meetings very favourably—and much more positively than attendees do.’ If you’re in that situation, nudge your team leader to experiment with calling in the work ‘party planner’ (a.k.a facilitator) and let’s get this party started!