Motivational workshop ideas / Business Blog

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Motivational workshop ideas

Motivation / October 26, 2022

Running workshops for motivation, team-building and improving performance

Workshops combine training, development, team-building, communications, motivation and planning. Participation and involvement of staff increases the sense of ownership and empowerment, and facilitates the development of organisations and individuals. Workshops are effective in managing change and achieving improvement, and particularly the creation of initiatives, plans, process and actions to achieve particular business and organisational aims. Workshops are also great for breaking down barriers, improving communications inside and outside of departments, and integrating staff after acquisition or merger. Workshops are particularly effective for (CRM) customer relationship management development. The best and most constructive motivational team-building format is a workshop, or better still series of workshops, focusing on the people's key priorities and personal responsibilities/interest areas, which hopefully will strongly overlap with business and departmental aims too. Workshops can be integrated within regular monthly team meetings - an amazing amount of motivation progress and productivity can be accomplished with just a 90 mins workshop per month. Workshop facilitation by a team leader or manager develops leadership, and workshops achieve strong focus on business aims among team members. Workshops are very effective for training too - workshops encourage buy-in and involvement more than conventional training courses because they are necessarily participative, and the content and output are created by the delegates. Also, the relationship between workshop facilitator or workshop presenter and delegates is participative, whereas a 'trainer' is often perceived as detached, and the training material 'not invented here'.

There are many workshop format variations - here's a basic workshop format:

It's also important to decide workshop objectives in relation to the team's 'maturity', experience and development - refer to the Tuckman 'forming storming norming performing' model, and the Tannenbaum and Schmidt model to understand and agree the level of freedom and responsibility to give the team during workshops, and in agreeing workshop follow-up actions and responsibilities.
At start of workshop, introduce aim and process - agree expectations - answer queries. (5 mins)
Split the group into pairs or threes (more usually creates passengers) and ask them to come up with outline actions/initiatives/plans to achieve agreed purpose/aim. (20-30 mins)
Have groups present back their ideas - review and praise positives aspects in each, and gently agree areas which would benefit from improvement/refining. (max 5 mins per group)
Follow up, coach, encourage, support and invite ideas for future workshop items and process improvements.

tips on designing workshops

Workshops are an extremely flexible and effective method for training, learning, development, change management, team building and problem solving, and virtually any organizational challenge.

You can actually run any sort of workshop you want - your options are as wide as your imagination and certainly not limited to off-the-shelf or tried and tested formats.

Think about and then agree openly your aim(s) for each workshop or and/or session.

Invite suggestions from delegates beforehand as to workshop subjects and aims if you want to maximise commitment and empowerment.

It helps for certain aims to use a model or concept to explain the theory behind your intentions, for example if dealing with communications and motivation, helpful models are: Johari, Maslow, Mcgregor, Tuckman, Emotional Intelligence - these sort of concepts are interesting and accessible for students and organizational delegates of all types. There are many others on this site.