Conferences and awaydays

Last week was Staff Conference week. This week, our departmental awayday.

First, our staff conference. Thankfully, unlike every other conference, delegates aren't bombed with lanyards, bags, gimmicks and other rubbish made from materials destined for landfill. No doubt we're helping the planet. Unofficially, I suspect budgets don't extend to such trinkets. Nor should they. I have a cupboard at home, full of promotional guff. I want the space back, though I'm terrified it'll choke guillemots and poison oceans.

Guillemots? Here's our honorary Doc John Hegley, of this parish, to explain:

Anyway. Here are some random nuggets from the day:

• The free lunch packs went down a storm. For some reason, I didn't get one;
• I was, however, happy recipient of two bags of Minstrels and a packet of Twiglets thanks to the excellent efforts of colleagues;
• I also enjoyed, though was slightly perplexed by the debate about "Marmite flavour" Twiglets;
• As if there is any other flavour. I know there was some tampering with a Worcester Sauce variant, but that, surely, was just a try out....

Groucho - they're messing the flavours up again

The sessions - those I attended - were fine. Special mention to John Pitts' gang culture talk, which was excellent. And for Ibraham, last week's blogger and VCO intern, who facilitated some good debate after showing a video TED talk, featuring an American chap with a headset, extolling the virtues of chaos over comfort when it comes to self deveopment.

I'm not sure about TEDs. Condensing intelligence into rhetorical models and arguments is a useful skill, but I like to take my time and see all sides. As I say, Ibraham was excellent. But nothing in the video I saw convinced me. I left with two thoughts; first, that the debate had been great. Second, I'm sure I've been here before, sitting with a comp coffee, in my workplace, being told to embrace jeopardy. I'm not sure I've got time for all that any more.

Me and Jeopardy? Sure. We go back...

Yesterday, we had our MARC awayday. Or MAR awayday. We lost the 'C'. Name change tbc and pending and all that. This awayday was hands on and operational. In some ways, it's a shame the Uni's strategists and TEDs don't get along to these events, though they'd probably get in the way, hogg the biscuits and, err, change the dynamic.

UCAS analysis was aired, though there seemed more value in reflecting, catching breath and pondering the reduction in the size of the team. There are about 30 of us in MARC, from around 60 four or five years ago. The awayday gave us 30 time to reflect, get real and talk about such stuff and not be given a kind of stock response about silos or smarter working.

Departmental awaydays seem more real and visceral somehow. And to the point. By nature, it's bottom up rather than top down. There's no talk about comfort zones or jeopardy; no blue sky thinking or horizon scanning. The flip charts have pictures rather than bullets. They're less jargony and more impactful. Even if impactful isn't really a word.

Then we had a barby, educational activity and bingo. Not exactly work stuff, but an invaluable time to reconnect with each other as humans. With Clearing just round the corner, this 'getting on' and understanding how people might work and react is important.

Anyway, these are my views. Of course, conferences and awaydays are neither the same thing, nor polar opposites. They shouldn't be compared, one versus the other. But then this is my blog. I've leave with an analogy; awaydays feel more like punk rock or free jazz; expressive, bumpy noise, with some heart and creativity, compared to many conferences I've been to, which feel more akin to orchestras  playing nursery rhymes in a great big echo chamber.

A team that plays together stays together

Beverley Hoare, Deputy Director of MARC

In Marcoms we’re very noses to the grindstone and drop everything at a moment’s notice to respond to some urgent press query, an event that we hadn’t been notified about or an emergency update to the website kind of people!

So to get a date that everyone (almost) could attend and in the end to pull themselves away from work for an away day was no small achievement. But the team wanted it, asked for it and valued it. Why?

Celebrating our team
achievements

Superglue - it’s important for team bonding – because we learn more about each other: likes, dislikes, motivations, because we like spending time together and we get to have fun. It gives some light relief from the day to day, a bit of perspective on our challenges and an opportunity to recognise the teams and individual achievements. 

Lots of life happens in the course of an academic year, so we celebrate too – one baby due in October, one marriage, two engagements, two 30^th birthdays and a house move.  We’ve had several losses to the team (fortunately not through natural causes) and two new staff have joined the team, but both worked at Bedfordshire previously – they loved it so much they came back.

Who do we think we are – in a Myers Briggs type approach we completed an online test to assess our personality types.  You might imagine that all marketers are extroverts, but not so, we’re quite an introverted bunch, drawing on our own internal imaginations and creativity.  As a team we are very caring, supportive and sensitive types, so be gentle with your critique – though we’re not looking for glory we do appreciate a well-placed compliment J

The Press team dominated the quiz, 
showcasing an unusual specialism in
animal trivia! 

Quiz master Andy entertained us with obscure questions about how male goats get a mate and the colour of a hippos sweat when it gets stressed – google it.  I may not be able to remember the answers to the serious HE questions but weirdly these have stuck.

It’s wasn’t  all fun and games - we ran some serious activities too, honest – we did some looking back and looking forward, focused on our objectives and the new PDA programme and generated loads of ideas for the question ‘how can we improve our brand, reputation and recruitment through social media’.  If you have any burning desire to give us some ideas please do get in touch.

Almost on to 2017...

So the final Open Day for this cycle has now taken place (yesterday) so I’m looking forward to planning the 2017 cycle of Open Days. Although we’ve been communicating with our 2017 enquirers since April, the official 2017 cycle starts from September. So I’ll be looking to finish my spring season open day report over the coming weeks so I can reflect on the good and the bad from this year, and see how we can further progress the plans for the 2017 cycle of Open Days.

And of course, while that’s happening, we’ve just kicked off with Clearing, which is the final part of the 2016 cycle. So it’s definitely still full steam ahead as Clearing is a really important time for us as a University.

I’ve also recently picked up some new projects:

Last years Best of Beds leaflet

1. Updating our Complete University Guide profile – updating the text with new messages, sourcing new images and updating links
2. Updating our Beds of Beds leaflet – updating messages and graphics with more recent stats and figures about Bedfordshire
3. Updating our Guide to your offer brochure – working with the admissions team to look at what updates are needed for this year, so we can send this guide out with offer letters

So I’m currently looking at timelines, print quantities, updates to information and so on, so I can work up production schedules and get started on the above job.
So all in all, it’s planning and evaluating for me over the coming weeks.

It's good to re-group as a team and reflect
and plan ahead!

We’ve also got our team away day tomorrow – we’re spending some time at our Putteridge Bury campus to re-group, discuss this year’s successes and looking at the next year moving forward.

Speak soon,
K