This was a jam-packed event buzzing with energy and excitement from the attendees. After reconnecting with past acquaintances, meeting new people from other employee-owned companies, and gaining countless ideas for increased engagement and culture, you may feel unsure of where to start once you return home. This experience is not exclusive to the Annual Conference; in fact, it may occur after other meetings and training sessions.
So, how do you take all the great information and ideas back to your company after an event? And why does it matter? First, bringing back lessons enhances your ability to influence your company’s growth and also solidifies the value of conferences in general, which could impact your company’s decisions around attending future events. This article will help you synthesize your conference takeaways, as well as share some concrete ideas from our Tampa event.
Begin by taking some time to reflect on the recent experience and the sessions you attended as well as the people you met. What were your top three takeaways? Takeaways, in this instance, are higher-level themes that require some action to improve, although they can also include areas where you are doing really well. It’s easy to over-focus on improvement, which can overshadow current strengths that can and should be reinforced. It’s important to acknowledge these strengths and any progress that has been made. Regardless, your top three takeaways may not be specific and discrete ideas. Some examples of themes and takeaways are:
Another approach is to think in terms of the magnitude of the takeaway, like small wins, big ideas, and current company practices to reinforce. The small wins are low-hanging fruit, things that can be implemented with minimal effort and still provide a high impact and return. Big ideas are more involved, the things you want to work toward that require advanced planning to build the steps toward your goal. Lastly, taking existing content, programs, and activities, assess how these can be augmented, or taken to the next level, for greater impact.
One example of how to augment current company practices comes from employee-owned CT3 and their presentation “Who Says Educators Can’t Be Owners?” For this session, they created a helpful rubric for employee engagement that illustrates how you can take concepts and establish what a “basic,” “standard,” and “plus” level of engagement looks like at your company. Taking this rubric concept, look at recent activities you’ve done and set expectations for the next time.
Employee appreciation day happens the first Friday in March (mark your calendars for next year—March 7, 2025). One easy idea here is to mark this as “Owner Appreciation Day” and use that as an opportunity to celebrate your employee-owners.
Employee Ownership Month (EOM) in October is an excellent opportunity to increase engagement at your company. Using raffles with giveaways from other employee-owned companies can foster increased participation in activities during EOM while also highlighting products from other EO companies.
Part of building an ownership mindset is about highlighting how individual actions impact collective outcomes—finding ways that small savings can add up over the course of a year can be helpful in connecting employee-owner actions to the bottom line and therefore benefiting their colleagues. This will look different at every company depending on industry, style of work, and more.
After reflecting on your key takeaways and jotting down ideas for easy wins and big ideas, it’s also a good idea to schedule time to debrief about the conference. There are different ways to approach this, and again it could require a few meetings. For example, if multiple people from your company attended, get together to share ideas and develop a cohesive point of view on what next steps to take.
Other ideas include scheduling time with your communications or culture committee, if you have one, to again review and brainstorm the ideas and start to establish a plan for implementation.
The last group to consider is leadership—either company leadership or your department leaders. This can be an effective way to highlight the value you received from attending the conference and create a lasting ripple effect for your company.