The stakeholders
• The Mayor, sponsor of the event
• The General Director of the Townhall Services (DGS), project manager and co- facilitator
• The DGS team, organizer of the event
• The Services and Departments Managers, team workshop facilitators
• The 220 Municipal Agents, participants
Context of the intervention
• Early September, I went to help the DGS of a city in Vendée to organize a first seminar with all city agents.
• Three goals were targeted for this seminar :
o Arouse the pride of agents for the role they play within their job and for the public service
o Promote dialogue and solidarity between agents and services
o Open space so that the agents be empowered in their work and willingly contribute to the collaborative project of the municipality
• One major constraint was to be managed: the separation of school agents from the rest of services for reasons of continuity of service.
Also a challenge and opportunity at the same time was to co-organize and co-facilitate an event with a team not accustomed to facilitation.
The flow
After having met the DGS and his team, the HR Director, the Mayor and most of Services and Departments Managers, we chose the flow as follows:
• Introduction and framing
o Welcome words
o Purpose, agenda and principles for the day
• World-Cafe in the morning, led from three questions, to help the agents to go back to the meaning in their work
o Who am I and what makes me particularly proud in my work today?
o How can we know that we do a good job?
o We are in 2016 and the magic happened. The municipal services of the city are as you had dreamt them 3 years ago. You are proud and happy to work there today. The city is shown as an example outside and agents from other cities come to meet you so that you tell them what happened. Tell them the story of what happened…
• Team workshop in early afternoon, to (re)discover the mission of each team/service
o What are the main activities that we take care of in our team/service?
o What is the overall mission emerging out of those activities for our service?
o Who are the members of our team ?
o What animal, image, music is … would well describe our team/service ?
• Quick Open-Space start in the late afternoon, in plenary, to allow agents to launch actions together
o What impactful actions we can start as of Monday, to improve the quality of our work and of our relationship between services?
• Closure
o A word of each participant on how the day was for her/him, graphically captured
o Closing words and thanks of the Mayor
Feedbacks
• Overall, the intervention was considered as a success, to be reiterated.
o A working and friendly atmosphere ; people sharing happily ; cohesion and adhesion to a collective project ; a time to step back and reflect ; the discovered potential of being actor of the project of the municipality.
• Of course, some learnings and questions arouse too when we did the later debrief :
o Was the flow of the second day too long? ; it was an extraordinary morning and the afternoon was not as well understood and perceived ; next time we should involve employee representatives as of the beginning.
A vision on the key success factors of the project
• The time taken to build relationship and trust between stakeholders and the openness of all of them
• The listening quality and responsiveness of the sponsor and organizers
Welcome