How to increase cross-team engagement and collect feedback with visual workshops

The challenge: increase engagement through cross-team workshops

Earlier that year, Emma’s team at Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc. had organized several internal focus groups. Their objective was to identify the words that would best define the company’s values at that stage of its development. 

Operating from the Boston region, Emma had run these focus groups online on Zoom. To capture everything the teams were saying, she had no other choice but to take lots of hand-written notes. And after one hour of meeting, she still needed to transcribe everything back anonymously to share it with the top management. Emma found that process was “incredibly administrative and manual”. She then started looking for a new way for employees at Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc. to share their feedback more efficiently.

As her boss was already familiar with Klaxoon, she suggested Emma organize the next steps using it, to run collaborative workshops. This time, they needed to engage the teams to find out how the company could embody the values established beforehand, in the focus groups.

I was looking for a tool to help employees collaborate more effectively, so I got very curious about this new tool.

The solution: a complete visual workspace to boost efficiency before, during and after the workshops

With Klaxoon, Emma hosted 3 one-hour workshops in two weeks with the US teams. Each time, about 35 people spread across the US volunteered to participate and gathered on Board, Klaxoon’s online whiteboard where the workshops took place.

Here, the focus was on collecting employee feedback on 2 areas:

• How Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc. can embody the values previously identified by the groups.
• How these values can also be easily adopted by the management.

Before the workshops: asynchronous preparation

When preparing the workshop materials in an asynchronous way, Emma wondered how she could benefit from Board’s visual management features to fully express the corporate evolution. That’s how she thought of an actual journey pathway, that would guide the participants from the start to the end of the reflection.

On this Board, Emma put her participants in the shoes of explorers going on a trip all around the world. This type of scenario can also be easily completed with a Klaxoon Adventure, depending on your context. 

Emma imported images in various formats to make her Board come alive. This ensures capturing the participants’ attention right at the beginning of the workshop, and personalizing their experience. For example, at some point, they would encounter sights, animals or challenges related to their corporate objectives. For Emma, this is the perfect way to turn the whole workshop into a truly immersive, and even more engaging experience.

Thanks to Klaxoon, I discovered that there are lots of ways to be creative, and I was able to bring my design of a journey to life.

During the workshops: various activities fostering interaction

Warming up the group with an icebreaker

When a workshop begins with a group, Emma starts by engaging the team with a short icebreaker. This activity is also directly connected to the traveling topic, as she asks the participants their favorite destination through a word cloud in a Storm Question.

In only a few minutes, this icebreaker allows her to create a climate of trust within the group. As most of the participants are working in different teams, they may not have known each other before. Thus, following this icebreaker, they feel more comfortable sharing their feedback with each other. What’s more, it ensures that they get familiar with using Klaxoon.

Efficiently gathering feedback with brainstorming polls

When the time comes for diving into the heart of the workshop, Emma moves to another area on the Board, thanks to the synchronization feature through which she can lead the group to follow her position on the Board. There, she has prepared open questions to gather their feedback. 

Topic after topic, the participants take a bit of time to add their ideas in the dedicated area. This way, all their answers are centralized in one place, and there is no need to take additional notes manually. And they are also able to use the “like” button to express their agreement with ideas shared by their colleagues, which could also have been achieved through a dot-voting session.

Between two ideation topics, Emma also prepared several Questions about corporate values and objectives. In some situations, note that the Question tool can also be used as a poll to collect participant feedback efficiently, and come up with instantly consolidated results. 

Making sure the group is on the same page with a Q&A session

The journey pathway ends with a chat about any questions participants could have, for each other and for Emma as the facilitator. 

And once the workshop is over, the Board remains accessible to the group, with all the ideas that have been shared. For the next group, Emma simply needs to duplicate the initial Board, to fill it up with new feedback collected during that session.

After the workshops: accelerating the reporting phase

After every session, everything goes very quickly for Emma. She just exports the workshop’s Board in two clicks as a PDF file. This encapsulates all the information and brainstorming process, and Emma can use it to communicate the outcomes to the management in a very seamless way.

This was incredibly efficient and made it easy to make recommendations to my boss about areas we should pay attention to.

The result: participative workshops and easily shareable outcomes

With Klaxoon, Emma succeeded in creating a really immersive and engaging series of workshops for internal teams, all that while working remotely. This had a positive impact on employee experience, and encouraged different teams to interact together. As she mentions about the voting feature through the “like” button:

I love the ability to vote because, while facilitating, I was able to see what the group of participants agreed with as we spoke based on the number of votes on each note.

Emma also highlights that Board is a great tool when it comes to creativity, as it is “visually fun to look at”, and the groups feel involved in the journey metaphor she offered for these workshops.

On her side as well, Emma admits that using Klaxoon saves her a considerable amount of time, spent before and after the workshop on preparing and reporting. With Board, she could gain about 30 minutes during each workshop. And after spending only 2 hours designing the initial Board, she didn’t need to prepare anything else between two workshops with different groups, as she simply duplicated the Board.

Moreover, with the quick extract download, Emma gets a clear and visual report of each meeting, and doesn’t have to work on data transcription manually.