How to Inspire People With Business Change

We all know that a business’s long-term success often comes down to its people.

It’s the employee’s belief in a cause, their dedication and their passion to carry forward a vision, that takes a business into the future. How do you keep them excited? You inspire them.

This is easier said than done. Bound by business etiquette and corporate processes, it often seems difficult to inspire people on a personal level. Nevertheless, that was exactly our goal when we organised a recent conference in Denmark, where 100 of our client’s global stakeholders came together to collaborate and shape future business operations.

Empowering your workforce

The key goal of the conference was for people to learn something new, and to feel empowered enough to take away their new-found knowledge, integrate it into their everyday work, and truly make the business’s vision their own. As was the purpose of the conference, it was essential to turn momentary excitement into conviction – in turn creating true employee engagement and a sustainable campaign.

Learning and sharing knowledge

One of the key elements of our conference was giving people some food-for-thought in the shape of concrete business examples from their global peers. We highlighted different ways of working, ideas, processes and behaviours, which we saw as best-practice examples and which attendees could ‘take home’ with them and use in their own streams of work. It was important to us as well to show people that these things are possible; take away some of their fears and reservations, and empower them.

There’s always something for everyone

Something else we wanted to bring across to people was that there isn’t just one way to do things. The communications channels we used throughout the conference reflected exactly that. We made used of a diverse range of presentations, speakers and hosts, much video content, and of course engaging print materials. As different attendees tend to respond better to different communications channels, we wanted to make sure there was something there for everyone, and every participant had the chance to find inspiration in the content.

Creating a can-do attitude

Most importantly, we wanted to make sure attendees could create their own content, shape their own stories, right then and there. And so we involved everyone directly. We made use of collaborative work-shops and team-building exercises, and we used hand-held electronic voting devices, through which everyone could discuss and feed back thoughts and ideas immediately. Having worked closely with participants to create conference materials in the first place to give them involvement and ownership, we also featured people in pre-filmed video footage and published materials. This made for more personal discussions, but also created a ‘can-do attitude’ amongst people, showing them that whatever they want to accomplish, it is indeed possible.

I hope this gives you some ideas for your conferences and events. What have you tried that’s got good feedback from people?