Enterprise seminars traditionally meet a peak in popularity towards the start or the end of the year. The main feature of such events will be to gather your collaborators – part or all of them – outside your usual workspace and in various places, for one or several days. This unusual and often prestigious environment comes as a powerful leverage for your management or the organisation’s image.
Training, team-building and team cohesion, support for change, …The universe of seminars is substantial, but often underrated in most companies. Discover the foundational seminars and inspirational events of the Weniversity, Wemanity’s learning center!
1. What Are the Main Types of Enterprise Seminars?
52 million people took part in a company seminar in France in 2019. We can actually distinguish three broad types of seminars, with each one possessing its own goal.
Cohesion seminars to strengthen links among the teams
Team-building seminars will act as a starting point for more cohesion between the company’s employees and better interpersonal relationships between the different departments of a company to avoid a silo effect.
Those type of events often come with never-done – or even unusual – experiences, in order to make an impression and promote the agile approach to the participants.
For example, Wemanity recently organised a serious game based on agility for Metro France’s National Managers Convention: This took the form of a temporary restaurant made of 4 teams of 120 people, during four agile iterations with autonomous teams and a few changes for last-minute needs.
Which companies invest in seminars? In France, most big companies and department managers are granted a yearly budget for the organisation of seminars, to strengthen cohesion among teams and collaborate to define a goal. This trend is also spreading among middle-sized companies in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, and many other cities. The allocated budget for a seminar is for most companies between 121 and 230 € per participant. A work trip with a night at a hotel and the renting of a dedicated room, coming with animation and consistent activities, can appear as a powerful incentive for your collaborators or clients.
Inspirational seminars to bring together around a common goal
Communicating your vision for the future of the company to your employees can become a key factor for them to feel engaged on a long-term basis. Inspirational seminars mobilize collective intelligence of the group for a true collaborative leadership experience. Participants have to think together on a three-or-four-year vision, while laying the foundations and initiating actions to make such a vision come true.
This bottom-up approach, which is very different from a classic work meeting, allows managers to receive feedback from their employees to bring new ideas to their own analysis. This adds value to the existing strategic thinking.
A big company from the beauty industry recently benefited from Wemanity’s expertise. For two days, twenty collaborators of the Legal & Data Protection Office could think together about the horizon 2025 of their company. Participants acted collectively to dream and draw an inspiring and ambitious vision. They also put on paper a list of Objective Key Results (OKR) for 2022, so that they can start serenely the journey to this vision.
Foundation seminars to guide change
A seminar has a symbolic and prominent dimension. In that way, it could well be the ideal event to instill big organisational changes within the company. Those foundation seminars are often set in prestigious places and therefore offer the appropriate framework to lay the foundations of future changes and transformations.
The idea consists in getting out the usual operational reality of managers and collaborators to ask fundamental questions about the company’s future: How can this organisational change become a reality, and how can we achieve so together?
‘’What if you took together the challenge of creating the DIOR city of the future?’’. This was the pitch of a recent serious game during a foundational seminar for DIOR and their project for an evolution of their digital teams. The goal was to create together a city which would represent the future organisation and the culture of the House of DIOR. This imaginary city had to include collaboration and sharing between the different neighborhoods, symbolizing the teams.
2. Which Added Value Does a Seminar Bring?
Each seminar has its own dynamics as it adapts to priorities and requirements given by the company. The investment return of such an event can take several forms:
- A significant improvement in collaborators’ motivation;
- A renewed cohesion among different teams, for a foundation event gathering the most;
- A strengthened engagement of each individual towards a new vision or shared approach;
- An accountability or empowerment of executives;
- The creation of a paper or roadmap for the company’s future.
Enterprise seminars: Is there a long-term effect?
By definition, seminars are high-intensity, but also very short events. How do we keep up the initiative on the long term, then?
The inherent risk in such type of event, mostly when organized by a classic event agency, is not having follow-up: Without clear goals or concrete repercussions in the company’s day-to-day, such events can be deceptive or fall flat. The effect on collaborators’ motivation that could be expected on the short-term is no longer there on the long-term.
After a seminar, the goal is to transform the experience into real measures within the company:
- Communication on actions to take and new ideas;
- Engagement of potential ambassadors and leaders who emerged during the seminar;
- Scheduling of shorter and informal meetings or follow-up events throughout the year.
How to organise a enterprise seminar?
A seminar can be organised by the company itself, an event agency or even a specialized partnered office like Wemanity.
In practice, a truly efficient event, moreover appreciated by collaborators, could turn into a real incentive. However, a careful reflexion must take place beforehand, so is the definition of several criteria, including:
- The selection and turnover of activities and animations during one or several days, in order to create a truly immersive experience;
- A convenient rhythm to create between group activities, messages to shares, networking operations, …;
- The opportunity for everyone to express leadership during the different seminar modules;
- A perfect attention to logistics for the event to be qualitative and unique, while respecting the allocated budget (hotel or other fixture depending on the city, room renting, catering, transport, …);
- The choice of a convenient work space, in order to push creativity and forget the daily routine.
Wemanity: Guiding you through your enterprise seminar
In contrast to simple event agencies, Wemanity is a unique counsel group and project guide. We help companies in building and giving life to their organisations in an agile, performing and responsible way, while always keeping the client in mind as well.
Ou foundation and inspirational seminars lay a stimulative framework to instill a transformation strategy and guide through its first steps. Different activities are specially crafted to favor acculturation and a shared desire around a project for change.
Every seminar, wether organised in your city or another for a change of landscape, is co-built by a multidisciplinary team and is entirely personalized. Beyond team- building itself, the event’s preparation always keeps in mind the clear goals which are set:
- The behaviors and state of mind to promote to the collaborators (co- development, agile spirit,…);
- The type of feedback or insight to get for a future communication or transformation plan;
- The selection and creation of ambassador work groups, in order for the reflexion to continue at the workplace after the seminar;
- The set-up of a communication plan for each time period of the event: before, during, and after the event.
You can trust Wemanity to instill an agile and immersive state of mind within your company.
The three key points to remember : - Enterprise seminars are key events and foundational moments for most companies. - They favor team-building with recreational activities, as well as collaborators’ motivation , and long-term prospective reflexion. - A counsel office like Wemanity makes sure every seminar is crafted according to your needs, and accompanies you to Paris, Lyon, Lille and everywhere else in France.
