The Brief:
The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) is the professional membership body for family doctors working in the UK and overseas.
RCGP went through a period of intense change and still continues to evolve. Driven by external influence, their strategic plan 2017-2020, Core Values and the new leadership team’s ambition, there has been a conscious shift to become a more progressive, innovative and focused organisation with core values instilled in the way they do business.
As a result, for more clarity, they decided to launch the new ways of working – the RCGP Way – at their Annual Employee Conference on 6 December.
They approached Wildgoose, looking for a customised interactive Team Building solution that would immerse delegates in the company’s values, promote collaboration and maintain engagement throughout the day. We worked together to design an engaging and meaningful sessions at their conference. We had two windows in their conference agenda (a 15-minute morning slot, and a 90-minute slot after lunch).
The Solution:
Our creative team worked closely with the client to create two completely Custom-Made challenges for the conference. Using the discovery, design and delivery process – we were able to really get under the skin of RCGP’s brand, core values and truly understand the issues surrounding the ‘disconnect’ within the business.
Using this information, it was decided that the initial 15-minute gap in the morning would be filled with a short icebreaker activity, designed to bring people together in their teams (which were deliberately pre-decided), create a buzz about the day ahead and get people communicating. The 90-minute Team Building Activity post-lunch would be an immersive Indoor Activity themed around a popular time travel concept and focus on exploring the company’s values using collaborative gameplay and fun multi-media challenges.
Ice Breaker Activity:
With only 15 minutes for a quick icebreaker session in the morning, our team set about creating challenges that would get people interacting with each other, and help to build anticipation for the day ahead. We came up with the idea of getting teams to work out which surprise guest would be presenting the awards ceremony later on in the conference, using a series of clues.
Each team were given one or two different clues for the ‘Who am I’ challenge and then had to use the in-app messaging function to exchange information with other teams. The objective of the activity was for each team to gather as much information as possible to successfully guess who the presenter would be, whilst networking and collaborating with each other.
The Main 90 minute session
Following a consultative process with RCGP, the creatives at Wildgoose developed a unique concept that would see teams using a time machine to travel across the world, whilst completing a series of interactive tasks, photo and video challenges that would help them build up speed and propel them along on their journey.
At the start of the activity, teams were prompted to scan a photo of a passport found on their tables using image recognition technology.
This unlocked a completely customised game screen depicting their time machine and a map of the world. The aim was simple, teams needed to travel as far across the world as possible in the time available – the team that made it the furthest and reached the highest speed would be crowned the winner.
Sequential hotspot functionality (where the hotspots release in a specific order one after the other) was used to map out the route teams would be traveling across the globe – with each hotspot containing bespoke challenges based on RCGP’s core values:
- Excellence
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Care
Tasks featured in the game were all designed to fit into the key value areas above. As part of the ‘Excellence’ segment of the activity, teams were asked to note down their first impressions of people shown in photos, before making a guess at their professions. These professions were revealed later on in the day and were designed to demonstrate how unconscious bias needs to be removed in order to deliver clinical excellence. To tie in with the wider context of the conference and the focus on RCGP’s new strategy, the ‘Care – the college cares about you’ segment of the activity contained content provided to us by the client. This content was turned into challenges by our team which would earn participants a speed boost. Feedback questions invited participants to provide suggestions for the future strategy of the company, in areas such as employee benefits and flexible working.
All results were collated using the Wildgoose platform’s inbuilt statistics suite – allowing us to provide RCGP with a completely customised report for them to use in post-conference follow-up.
With there being nearly 60 teams participating in the activity, it was set up in collaboration mode – this meant that the teams were divided between 4 overarching groups, each representative of a core value. Collaboration challenges are designed specifically to encourage teams to engage with each other both within their larger groups and across different groups in an attempt to get as far across the world as possible.
The Results:
The conference activities delivered by Wildgoose, and the wider event itself were a huge success. The creation of both an interactive energiser and a longer 90-minute Team Building Activity broke up the conference agenda and kept the delegates engaged throughout.
We were able to successfully meet the objectives required by the client through the use of collaborative gameplay, content, and challenges that required teams to work with one another, whilst at the same time reinforcing RCGP’s new strategy. In addition, the client will be able to use the statistics gathered in the platforms measurement suite, captured through tailored questions, to influence the future direction of the organisation and engage delegates with the strategy creation process,
Statistics gathered from the event show that 100% of participants felt they came away knowing their colleagues better than when they arrived, with over 80% of those going on to say that they would like to use more technology-based, gamified activities in their conferences in the future. The Custom-Made gamified time travel theme helped to communicate the client’s new strategy past, present, and future in a unique and engaging way – so much so that over 95% of participants said that the activity provided the perfect vehicle to learn new skills and expand their knowledge.
