Workshops and webinars

Top employers have happy employees, satisfied and loyal customers, and successful business results. Top employers are magnets in the job market. Who wouldn’t want that? Every employer can become a top employer! However, there is no quick fix to becoming a top employer.

The workshop covers:

• The impressive benefits of being a top employer
• Determining when you are a top employer
• The anchors of top employership: purpose/mission, vision, core values and slogan
• The roadmap to top employment

Managers profoundly impact the happiness of their team members. According to a Gallup survey, leadership accounts for 70% of the variation in happiness at work. Poor leadership leads to less effort and higher absenteeism and employee turnover rates. As a leader, what can you do to increase your team’s happiness?

The workshop covers:

• What makes employees really happy (and what no more than ‘satisfied’)
• Which leadership styles and roles (visionary, expert, manager and coach) make employees happy and how do you as a leader score on these aspects
• Successful actions for making your team happy or happier
• How do you as a leader remain happy

The employer vision or HR vision is a forward-looking view that highlights the experiences and emotions you aim to convey as an employer. It reveals what makes employees happy in ways that contribute to the organisation. This ambition must be inspiring, easily understood and measurable. Moreover, the ambition must be distinct from those of other employers and appropriate for your organisation. The employer’s vision offers guidance, serving as a compass in the development of associated (HR) tools. But where do you start?

The workshop covers:

• The organisational perspective: the fundamentals of the purpose (the organisation’s ‘why’, higher purpose), the vision (what you aim to achieve over the longer term), the core values (the unchangeable DNA), and the organisational slogan (customer promise).
• The employee perspective: what reputation do you want to have on the job market, for whom do you want to be an attractive employer and for whom not? How does your organisation want to be unique for employees and distinct from the competition? What do employees want from their employer?
• In co-creation, formulating the ‘draft’ version of the employer’s vision, internal sounding boards, and subsequent implementation
• Testing current (HR) activities and working methods, implementation, communication and follow-up actions.

Your organisation’s core values are its DNA: deeply rooted and determining the organisation’s identity. Employees and customers derive strength and confidence from core values, as they let everyone know what to expect: ‘This is what we stand for, this is our focus and compass’. Core values are unchanging, even if markets change. Core values are not simply conjured up: you must find them, because they are already present. And sometimes an added dash of ambition is required.

You want to (re)establish the core values. Or you have core values, but the words have lost their meaning and are no longer adhered to. You want to breathe new life into them!

The workshop covers:

• How do you ensure the right unique core values, appropriate for your organisation
• Collectively finding and establishing (or recalibrating) the core values
• What types of behaviour align with your core values, and which types certainly do not
• How do you keep the core values alive
• Co-creation, implementation and communication of your core values
• Best practices for good core values in action

According to HR trend watchers, employee experience is the ‘next step’ for HR and number 1 trend. Really putting employees first and offering them a ‘Best Workplace’: that is how your organisation becomes and remains a top employer and business success. According to international research (KennedyFitch, 2019), 90% of HR managers expect a (sharp) increase in the attention given to employee experience in the coming years. Really putting the employee first means widening the focus to encompass the entire ’employee experience’. A good employee experience means you focus on all of the employees’ interactions with the organisation, from first contact to offboarding and even beyond, ensuring that former employees remain ambassadors for your organisation. All interactions between employees and their employer must result in the most positive experiences possible.

The workshop covers:

• Introduction to employee experience (EX): what is EX, how does it differ from traditional HR, why is EX important, EX in the age of Covid-19
• The strategic anchors of employee experience
• E.A.R.T model of employee experience, the 5 factors: Happy culture; Energising work environment; Agile leadership and organisation; Redesigning the employee journey; and Technology that works for you
• Best practices of employee experience
• The employee experience roadmap

As management, you would like your employees to display more ownership: take responsibility, keep agreements and make real contributions to the organisation. This will increase productivity and collaboration, and your team’s happiness at work. Yet why does this sometimes fail to occur?

The workshop covers:

• The various aspects of ownership
• Management’s impact on team ownership
• Analysis of the ownership within your team
• Actions to increase the sense of ownership

The office of the future is an inspiring, energising work environment, a workplace that gets the best out of people and where employees feel creative, productive and happy. If we start working from home more frequently in future, will we still need offices? Yes, we certainly will, as there are many reasons for maintaining a collective workplace. The office of the future is a meeting place where employees come together, a source of inspiration for innovation, and where the organisation displays its DNA. But something must change, because 65% of employees find their workplaces uninspiring.

The workshop covers:

• The function of the office of the future: meeting place and source of inspiration
• The aspects that make employees like to keep coming to a main office
• Imposing your organisational DNA in the office environment
• Enjoyable meetings, how you can facilitate them
• Best practices for the office of the future

The coronavirus pandemic has had a major impact on our current and future ways of working. We want to preserve the good aspects of the lockdown: the speed of interactions, creativity, solidarity and support for one another. Our work is rapidly becoming more digitalised, and working from home more routine. The function of the office will change: from workplace to clubhouse. And leadership’s role must be adapted accordingly. What does this ‘new normal’ mean for the workplace and how do we deal with it successfully?

The workshop covers:

• The new normal at work
• What the new normal means for happiness at work
• How digitisation and working from home impacts the work-life balance, organisation, employment conditions, communication, personal development, leadership, vitality, pleasure and interconnectedness
• Tips for making the new normal successful

This workshop is a ‘boost camp’ for increasing happiness at work in your team! For teams of 10 to 50 people, our focus is on each individual’s happiness at work, as well as that of the team.

The workshop covers:

• What is ‘happiness at work’ and why is it important for you?
• In what do employees find happiness at work?
• How do you score in terms of your own happiness at work?
• What can employees, teams and organisations do to increase their happiness at work?
• Happiness at work activities for your team

The workshop consists of a mix of scientifically based information about happiness at work, personal experiences, short ‘fun’ exercises for the participants, and group interactions.

Many of the fun activities we organise at work occur outside of the workplace or working hours. Playing ping-pong during breaks or organising Friday evening drinks are all very enjoyable, but there is still much to be gained from our work itself: spicing up our work helps relieve tension and make dull jobs more challenging, thus keeping boredom at bay. This in turn creates more flow in the work, while simultaneously generating greater enthusiasm and happiness at work.

In our work, we often shoot too quickly for results, which we want to achieve as efficiently and effectively as possible. A better approach is to first experience the pleasure in the doing, because the doing is what determines how we will reflect on our work. Making work more playful creates more ‘flow’ in the work and thus also greater enthusiasm.

Playful Work Design, ‘a behavioural approach that makes an activity more playful’, can be approached in two ways: Agonistically, via competition, the setting of goals or rules; and playfully, by making work enjoyable and fun. In designing your work to be playful, you are not undermining your work: rather, this approach must be at least as effective and ideally much more effective!

The feeling of being noticed and understood, and appreciated, is one of our basic needs. Receiving genuine appreciation is a great motivator for employees, making them happy and encouraging them to do their best and accept new challenges. Ultimately, we all want to feel important, and feel that our contributions are noticed and appreciated. Employees who feel unappreciated can become demotivated and frustrated, which is a shame, because there are many effective ways for managers and teams to start showing their appreciation. For teams of 10 to 100 people who want to get started on taking practical approaches!

The workshop covers:

• Why appreciation and praise are so important
• How we can appreciate one another more
• Complimenting exercise
• Brainstorming about how those in your team can appreciate each other more
• Inspiring examples

Your organisation’s employees are working more from home, and this demands different ways of interacting. How do we deal with the office workplace? How can we remain connected and have fun together? What do we expect from leadership? What facilities do we need? In short: how can you make remote working successful in your team?

The workshop covers:

• Remote working’s impact on organisations, teams and working environments
• How we maintain connectivity and relationships with one another as a team
• How we can maintain personal growth and innovation
• Best practices

This workshop takes you on an interactive trip through the principles of employee experience architecture and design thinking for HR. You will subsequently start applying these principles to part of the employee journey.

A great employee experience is not a fluke, nor does it happen by itself. You must design it! Employee experience design is the art of designing a workplace experience that results in happy employees. Employee experience design draws on proven techniques from the worlds of marketing, product & user design, and psychology. It is a creative method for achieving new, innovative solutions for (complex) problems. Here, the fundamental principle always applies: people are central. End users and stakeholders are actively involved in designing or improving products and services.

Design thinking for HR is used to actively transform the employee journey – from recruitment to offboarding. You put yourself in the (potential) employee’s shoes and reshape the employee journey, using positive emotions and surprises, and doing more than the employee expects, in keeping with organisation’s standards and values. The guiding principle is the employee’s expectations, not the organisation’s functional requirements.

Working with employee experience design is deemed a new HR skill, and one required for taking employee experience to a higher level. The popularity of this approach is rapidly growing. Employee experience design and design thinking for HR are good fits for the agile way of working that many organisations already espouse. And this has major benefits, according to research conducted by McKinsey (2019): companies that reserve a primary role for design thinking within their organisations are nearly twice as successful financially as their competitors.

The workshop covers:

• The principles of employee experience architecture
• The experiences that make employees happy
• Effects of techniques like nudging, framing, delighters and playful work design
• The pillars of your organisation’s employee experience ambition
• Working with personas: the benefits for HR
• Elements of the employee journey
• Fact-based and data-driven work: the corresponding data and research you can use
• Implementing tech solutions for HR
• Using the design thinking method to map and analyse (part of) the employee journey
• Working in small groups in order to convert bottlenecks into ideas for improvement and collectively creating a new design

An employee journey lifecycle maps the various stages an employee goes through while engaged with the organisation, from the orientation and application stages to offboarding. The employee journey consists of various underlying sub-journeys. When devising an employee journey, you put yourself in the employee’s shoes and structurally map their current journey. The employee journey differs for each organisation, but generally follows the same route: inflow, throughflow and outflow. Mapping the individual employee journey is the first step toward engaging with its various parts.

The workshop covers:

• Target and target group for determining the employee journey
• Devising the employee journey for your own organisation, with requisite levels of detail and word choice
• Visualising the employee journey
• Key ‘touchpoints’ in the employee journey: touchpoints where the organisation can positively or negatively influence the employee’s behaviour or opinions about the organisation. We also map the emotions and positive thoughts the organisation targets with each touchpoint
• Priorities in the employee journey when getting started
• Roadmap for improving the employee journey

Working with personas that represent your employees is a productive way to improve the employee experience. Marketeers have long used personas to learn more about their customers. If meeting your employees’ needs is your goal, ‘one size fits all’ thinking will not work, nor will thinking in terms of target groups (‘male, aged 25-35, BSc’) create the necessary connections. The next step toward deepening and genuine empathy is working with personas: fictional characters representing specific target groups, which you create based on research and data. A persona tells the story of the exact target group you want to work for your organisation, or that already works there, but for whom you want to improve the employee journey. A persona gives a segment a face, enlivening your target group, and making it easier to empathise with these employees and understand them with empathy.

The workshop covers:

• The benefits of working with personas
• The number of personas needed for a sub-journey
• Creating personas: research, characteristics, background
• Co-creation, testing and adjustment
• Action plans for working with personas and testing HR policies and actions

Starting work at a new employer is a key moment. Good onboarding determines whether new employees feel at home, will be immediately productive and ultimately want to remain working at the organisation. Nevertheless, only 29% of employees are enthusiastic about their initial period at a new employer. How can organisations ensure that their employees get off to a good start?

The workshop covers:

• The benefits of a good onboarding
• The 5 stages of onboarding
• Making new colleagues enthusiastic before their first day at work
• Onboarding: the first day, first week, first month, first year
• Best practices of onboarding

Organisations which put good employee experiences first do not assess and reward in traditional ways. Rather, such organisations speak of ‘the new assessment’ and ‘continuous dialogues’, ‘the good conversation’ or PET-discussion (Performance, Employability and Talent). These new approaches pertain to job satisfaction, commitment, appreciation, personal and professional development, enthusiasm and sustainable employability. As an organisation, how do you ensure that discussions, the content of discussions and rewards actually fit your organisation?

The workshop covers:

• Why traditional assessment and reward systems are no longer effective
• Characteristics of the new assessment and agile rewards
• The power of appreciative inquiry and focus on talents
• Financial and personal appreciation
• The role of variable rewards and bonuses
• Best practices for the new rewards and agile rewards

Reboarding is the onboarding of current employees: activities which help guide and support employees during transitions. This could for example pertain to an impactful organisational change, or long-term teleworking due to the coronavirus, resulting in the need to reconnect.

The workshop covers:

• Reboarding: in addition to communication, safety and health, how does one ensure that employees have good experiences when they return and once again feel welcome in the workplace?
• Structural increase in teleworking: how do you maintain relationships, personal growth and innovation?
• How do you deal with employees who dare not return to the workplace or are uncomfortable with the changes?
• Best practices for good reboarding

The manner in which a person departs an organisation largely determines how they will recall their employee experience. Did the employee experience in the organisation end positively? Whether a voluntary or forced offboarding, good closure is crucial. How can you ensure that an offboarding is a good and agreeable experience, and that the former employee eventually becomes a true ambassador for your organisation?

The workshop covers:

• Properly handling voluntary and forced offboardings
• Promptly knowing who is leaving the organisation
• Reorganisations involving forced layoffs
• How to convert employees into ‘boomerangs’ and ambassadors for life for your organisation
• The exit interview and good closure of period of employment
• Best practices for offboarding

The Dutch government has advised that in the interim people should continue working from home as much as possible. This demands a new way of approaching issues like the office as workplace, leadership, maintaining relationships, facilities and mutual agreements. How does HR makes remote successful?

The workshop covers:

• Remote working’s impact on the organisation, team, HR and work environment
• How to interact and maintain relationships with one another
• How to maintain personal growth and innovation
• Best practices for remote working

To determine what options are available to you in terms of making improvements, you must routinely measure how employees experience the employee journey. The ’employee’s voice’ can be measured in various ways: qualitative and quantitative, active and passive. What are the best ways to measure employee experience?

The workshop covers:

• The (pulse) survey: frequency, content and target group
• Using sounding board groups and panels
• Digital mood measurements
• Analysing outcomes
• Getting started on measuring outcomes

From putting out fires to stoking a fire! Take a different approach to projects, one that evokes change in your organisation: experiment instead of making detailed plans, use customer feedback instead of intuition, and design iteratively rather than working with large, preconceived designs. This workshop teaches you how to start taking an agile and integrated approach. Start with what the employees want, learn, work from the bottom up, and celebrate success. Allow your organisation to change in ways that makes your employees happy.

The workshop covers:

• Tapping into innovative strengths and starting to create movement
• The agile approach
• Alignment of your approach
• Infusing your approach with energy and surprise

Does HR still have a future? It is a valid question, because to remain relevant in future, HR must reinvent itself. Where should HR start and what roles are involved? Will we continue to call our profession HR? Is your HR team ready for the future?

The workshop covers:

• The future of professional HR content, processes and focus
• HR’s future key functions and roles
• What challenges does your HR team face?

You are an independent (HR) professional or HR team and want to enhance your social selling skills, especially via LinkedIn. You want to learn how to present enticing content that leads to connections with potential clients or job candidates.

The workshop covers:

• What is social selling?
• The 7 steps from social selling via content to business
• Killer content: what works on LinkedIn?
• The ‘Know-Like-Trust’ principle and the T.H.I.N.K. principle
• Your personal brand and LinkedIn score
• Analysis of current LinkedIn activities
• What can we learn from other companies?

How do you make your employees more human? How do you ensure that technology really works for you? How do you avoid the long IT projects to achieve this? In this inspiration session we discuss what software robots or Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can mean for you as an HR specialist. Moreover, you will learn what this could mean for your employees, and how you can discover opportunities for robotisation, converting them into three key benefits: higher quality, higher productivity, and of course a better employee experience.

During this session we present best practices from other organisations that have successfully deployed RPA, and you will learn how to keep an eye on the human side of digitisation. Or as we say: Make your employees more human by removing the robot from the human!

This workshop/webinar is conducted by Unlocking Digital & Ciphix

Some of an HR professional’s work involves manual and repetitive tasks. With a new generation of chatbots in your team, employees can focus on the activities that really matter. Would you also like a greater focus on people rather than administration? Do you also want to give both employees and HR professionals a better employee experience? But how can you ensure that chatbots really do their jobs well? Best practices reveal how chatbots improve the employee experience.

This workshop/webinar is conducted by Unlocking Digital & Ciphix