Team away day with Wessex Cancer Support
Case Study
The challenge
Supported by a team of paid staff and volunteers, Wessex Cancer Support (WCS) delivers emotional support and wellbeing services – both in person and online – to people with cancer and their loved ones.
When they contacted us, Wessex Cancer Support was planning an exciting growth strategy, which was very much based on aligning their operations with their new values and behaviours. In July 2023, there was an opportunity to bring together around 120 people for a team away day, to forge better connections between employees and start building momentum for the future.
The charity’s key objectives for the day were:
- To embed new values and behaviours – helping staff and volunteers connect with them, share what they mean to and for them, and what they expect to see and feel in response to them
- To enable contributions to the future strategy (beyond 2024)
- To get to know the senior leadership team
Our approach
The team here at Lodestar worked alongside Wessex Cancer Support’s CEO and its senior leadership team to come up with an engaging and informative agenda for the day.
We hosted an energising ice breaker, which was specifically designed to encourage team members to get to know their peers and fully engage with the session’s objectives. This was followed by a reminder of Wessex Cancer Support’s vision and purpose, which was brought to life through a short video.
Next, an overview of the organisation’s financial performance and the current strategy set the scene for group discussions on the content of the away day. Semi-structured questions enabled us to bring out the key themes that were on people’s minds through a lively Q&A session. Attention then turned to the new values and behaviours (V&Bs), which describe how the charity will achieve its vision and what clients will see and feel when they visit their centres and shops.
At a high level, Wessex Cancer Support chose four key words to describe their approach:
- Compassionate
- Purposeful
- Inclusive
- Collaborative
Delegates now had the chance to be creative by designing posters on the theme of “what the values mean to me and why”, including their thoughts on how they show up today and what the charity needs to do more of in the future to embody them further.
Creating a memorable 100+ strong poster wall was a great visual reinforcement of the energy in the charity and a reminder of how people hold these values. Walking the wall together enabled reflection on what they were seeing, with compassion and inclusion very strong themes – both on the walls and felt in the room; a lot of hearts on the wall; and “a lot of love and kindness in the room”.
The focus then shifted to the future. Participants were invited to join breakout groups in their areas of passion: Services, Retail, Fundraising, Volunteers. Wessex Cancer Support’s leaders were on hand to bring the current strategy to life via a combination of individual and group engagements that asked participants to respond to the below question:
“If you had a magic wand, what would you wish for Wessex Cancer Support over the next five years? How could you make that happen?”
Attendees shared a wealth of ideas, resulting in some healthy discussion, and these were taken away by the SLT as input for the board strategy work later in the year.
The final session of the day was a facilitated Leadership Team/Trustee Q&A session using a combination of questions that were sent in advance and shared in the room.
Ending well is important to the success of any team away day. Our powerful close was orchestrated in two parts.
We launched a V&B celebration process via the regular newsletter, which recognised colleagues for bringing the charity’s values to life day to day, and for thinking about the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’.
We then went right back to where the day started: looking at why Wessex Cancer Support exists, and how it serves its community. We were joined by a client who has benefitted from the organisation’s services. She was delighted to share her powerful story and her own personal experiences. It was a moving and very fitting end to a great day that we were privileged to be part of.
What the client said...
“We were so thrilled to have your involvement. It made such a difference to have you there as external facilitators for so many reasons – less stress for me and others, a bit more authority when it comes to herding people around, and the benefit of your professionalism and experience, to name but a few. As one of my colleagues said, your involvement elevated the day from ‘great’ to ‘brilliant’.”