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East Riding Council

Conferencing at East Riding Council

“It is a challenge to think of new and innovative ways of delivering a conference which not only benefits the council but is interesting and thought-provoking for the managers. CragRats were instrumental in our success in achieving this difficult task.”

Chris Brown, Training and Development Manager, East Riding Council

/challenge

East Riding Council approached CragRats with a request for some ideas on how they might go about staging their 7th annual conference for 400 managers from throughout the organisation.

Having recently improved their Comprehensive Performance Assessment ranking from ‘good’ to ‘excellent’, the Council was eager to build on and harness its success in order to further its ambition of being in the top 10% of councils in all service areas by 2006. ‘Striding Ahead’ would be the focus for this process, and the annual conference would aim to enthuse, motivate, and inspire managers to promote a positive culture of continual improvement throughout all departments.

After six years of various event styles, and feedback from delegates that they wanted to be ‘more involved’ in the process, the Council decided it was time to challenge and engage delegates in a completely new and innovative way.

/approach

A managers’ conference that would actively and intellectually involve 400 delegates is a challenge by anyone’s standards. At an early stage, the Council Executive identified six key areas that would be crucial in achieving the organisation’s goals. It was decided that following an address by the Chief Executive, each of these individual subjects would form the basis of a single workshop session that each and every delegate would attend at some point during the day. The subject areas would be: delivering on tough performance targets, attracting investment and using public money wisely, attracting and retaining high quality staff, being at the leading edge of e-government, delivering quality services through quality partnerships and being absolutely in touch with their residents.

Each would be delivered in a unique style and the format was aimed at facilitating valuable discussion, sharing good practice, and creating a vision for the future of the organisation. Having been divided into six groups at registration, delegates would move around the venue on a ‘carousel’ system until they had experienced each individual workshop, making a total of 36 sessions run in the course of the day.

/results

• Delegates were actively engaged in discussing all six key areas focussed on by the Council
• The structure of the day encouraged managers from different departments to interact and share ideas
• Delegates developed a better understanding of policies and how their implementation improves the service provided by the Council
• A vision of how the Council can achieve further improvements was built up by the managers themselves
• A legacy of the day survives in the continuous improvement groups which are now a part of the Council’s organisational structure

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