Mira Vogelsang is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral fellow within the Health CASCADE project. Her research focuses on comparing the core elements of different co-creation processes, contributing to a generalisable protocol on how to conduct co-creation for workplace sedentary behaviour interventions.
Mira has been conducting several co-creation processes, each involving a series of workshops, that focus on reducing sedentary behaviour in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Glasgow, Scotland. At each workplace she facilitates a workgroup of employees who collaborate and develop actions tailored to their company. In this blog, she shares her biggest lessons so far on facilitating co-creation workshops in the workplace.
Find out more about Mira’s research project website: https://workplacehealthstudy.co.uk/
Lessons learned with facilitation
In the last year, I have been facilitating co-creation workshops at SMEs in Glasgow, Scotland. I want to share my experience so that future facilitators may benefit from it. Lessons ranged from using fun and engaging tools to dealing with timing and goal setting.
Using tools and methods that are engaging is key to facilitation. When I first started working with employees, I hesitated to use fun – and sometimes goofy – methods. Ultimately, I found that they greatly enjoyed taking part in the games, quizzes and other fun tools. You can and should try to step outside the box to make an exercise as fun and engaging as possible. As my work focuses on reducing sitting, I experienced that also in the work setting, you should not shy away from getting them to stand up and move a lot more. Strategies such as having standing meetings, may not only break the usual way that meetings are conducted, and create a new angle of engagement, but it may also enhance other employees to do so.
When facilitating, it is also important to manage time. This was a huge learning curve for me, which I am still trying to get to grips with. Three tips helped me here: (1) I ran a pilot of our first workshop with colleagues; (2) I practice the duration of exercises and write down my estimated time for the session to use as a cheat sheet during it; (3) I consider before the start of a workshop which parts of the workshop I could shorten or drop, and which useful exercises I could add at the end. By considering this in advance, you will be better able to adapt to the pace of the meeting.
I also quickly learned I needed to clearly emphasise the purpose of the workshop and the exercises we were doing. It had to be clear how they fitted into the overall purpose. I found that discussing this explicitly, and often multiple times (e.g., mentioning the purpose of the workshop at the beginning and end of the workshop; and having an aim statement for every exercise), created more clarity about the process and contributed to their engagement.
The unique challenges with co-creation
Co-creation brings some unique challenges for facilitations. It is very important to create a safe space where everyone is of equal importance, but this can be difficult to do. I approached this by taking the time to talk to them about co-creation and how it affects our role and view of the process. I feel this contributed to successful co-creation workshops and helped them understand the flexibility involved. It also aided in explaining that we were there not as researchers, but as facilitators. We were there to support them to work together effectively and ensure that everyone was involved in a meaningful way.
Co-creation is supposed to be flexible and should be tailored to the needs of the group, but the work that goes into this can be intense and resource heavy at times. I recommend carefully considering your personal boundaries as a facilitator in co-creation workshops before-hand and reevaluating them during. I usually set aside two or three days to reflect on how the previous workshop went and work on the adjustments for the next workshop. This time-frame meant I could be very flexible and take on board many of the co-creators evaluations, but also allowed me to recognise when changes to be made fell outside this time-frame and thus my personal resources.
I suspect that I will face many more challenges as I continue my journey as a facilitator, yet I am very proud already of how much my team and I have learned, grown and succeeded. However, most importantly, I am proud of all the co-creators who successfully conducted the co-creation workshops. They produced many co-created actions that are taking off. I look forward to the co-creation workshops still to come. Cheers from Glasgow.
Find out more about Mira’s research project website: https://workplacehealthstudy.co.uk/