Innovation Day at New Verve

| Wed, July 06, 2022 | Company Culture | 0 comments

“The 4+1 model is a great way to add enablement at work and have continued learning as part of your job.” - Lana Nesredin, Solutions Team

Since the beginning of May, New Verve has been operating on a 4+1 working week. The +1 is our Innovation Day a time for learning and developing our employees’ professional skills. Innovation Day can take place over several hours slotted into the weekly calendar or a dedicated full day; how our teams decide to implement their enablement is under their control.

At New Verve, we pride ourselves on growing and supporting an innovative work culture. We believe in prioritising a learning atmosphere where our employees have the space they need to improve and evolve professionally. Read on to see how we define, manage and use Innovation Day.

What is Innovation Day?

It is a day, or set amount of hours, we have set aside in the working week for our employees to use to learn and improve their professional skills. Our employees are encouraged to take time to educate themselves to perform their jobs as effectively as possible. Innovation Day enhances the performance of our employees by encouraging them to research new concepts and methods. We trust our teams to have autonomy over their schedules and ensure that the Innovation Day produces positive outcomes and doesn’t negatively impact individuals, customers and New Verve generally.

We believe the outcome of these enablement and Innovation Days for New Verve will be extremely beneficial. We are hoping to see improved workflow, productivity and quality of our solutions, services and products. Ultimately, we are also hoping that these days will improve the engagement of our teams as well as individual and group health and wellbeing.

Enablement provides autonomy in terms of each employee’s professional goals. It allows individuals to decide what direction to take their learning and development in and ultimately helps cement where an employee feels they belong in their department and where they can add the most value.

How we Organise Innovation Day

We expect our employees and teams to keep track of their enablement so that we can measure the outcomes and effects. This can be done through creating Jira tickets to record and track enablement progress or, similarly, a Confluence article can be made to store knowledge and insights that have been explored.

Teamwork is important at New Verve and we hope that through Innovation Day teams will help each other learn and stay informed of their progress. One way this is done is for the team’s enablement findings to be presented to each other along with an explanation as to why particular innovations will enhance business. Similarly, catch-ups can be scheduled between team leads and employees to talk about, and share, the knowledge gained from enablement and innovation time.

Enablement is not just for individuals, there is also enablement for everyone that is compulsory. This is on topic areas such as mental health and wellbeing and equality, diversity, and inclusion as well as data protection. These are important parts of enablement and ensure that the entire New Verve team are on the same page in terms of company values and policy.

There are also frequent chances for cross-departmental knowledge sharing with activities such as Knowledge Sharing Workshops. For example, Louise Reilly the New Verve Marketing Manager recently led an SEO Knowledge Sharing Workshop which was a 45-minute breakdown of what SEO is, the Marketing team’s goals and other important information the team felt everyone needed to know.

Similarly, the Products team recently held a Show and Tell on the latest Crumbs: CRM for Jira developments which lasted around 30 minutes. Show and Tells are often held at the end of the month and teams such as the Technical Solutions team use them to present what they worked on for New Verve clients such as the script created for clients to run tasks.

Albert Ching who runs the Technical Consultants Show and Tell believes they’re a great way to increase knowledge sharing across the team and give updates on completed tasks whether that be current projects or team enablement. These workshops offer a chance for teams to showcase what they have been working on and also offer a chance for other teams and individuals to ask any questions they may have.

These workshops are vital to ensuring everyone feels included and can be a part of the bigger picture that New Verve stands for. They help to bridge the knowledge gaps between teams and unite the teams together which can reduce the complexity of cross-departmental tasks and eases collaboration.

The Advantages

By giving our employees more control over their professional development we hope to see higher engagement. This in turn should lead to an increasingly innovative culture in the workplace.

Enablement and innovation matter because it empowers employees to look at strategy and their personal-professional priorities and work on what is best for them. Innovation Days reject a standard training mould and let individuals create the unique learning path that works for them. Importantly, with the support of supervisors, employees can set their own goals that align with the company’s business objectives and maintain their focus on the company’s priorities while learning and developing their skills.

Managing performance enablement in this active way encourages employees to think big. Through meetings with their team lead employees can feel confident that they will be supported on their learning journey and will be able to reach their full potential. Innovation Day empowers individuals to take control of their professional development. It’s an opportunity for individuals to look at their work and skills retrospectively and enhance areas of their expertise. This then filters into everyday work and the skills and knowledge that are needed to perform job roles more efficiently and successfully are gained. Moreover, this knowledge and learning can also aid the well-being of the employee as they may feel happier and more fulfilled doing their work. This can then lead to employees feeling well equipped for possible challenges and being able to find the best solution for the company.

It also grants further flexibility to our working week, encouraging healthy work-life balance as well as a learning culture. We encourage employees to integrate enablement into their work week in a way that is most effective for them and their teams. This ensures everyone has the freedom to pursue opportunities they are passionate about while remaining committed to a schedule that works for them.

Innovation Day Examples and What do our Employees Think?

Overall, New Verve employees have found Innovation Day a great addition to the working week. It gives them freedom over their learning and professional development and has led to great initiatives taking place.

Everyone in the New Verve team has benefitted from the introduction of enablement day from our Executive team to our summer Interns.

Marketing Manager, Louise Reilly, has used her recent enablement time to complete an Agile Leadership and Management course. The course was aimed at equipping managers and leaders with tools and support to ensure smooth team management and development. This is an ideal example of why New Verve has decided to implement Innovation day. Through studying the course and gaining certification, Louise has worked on her professional development as well as benefited the teams she runs by gaining more tools and support.

In the Solutions Team, Lana Nesredin believes that the 4+1 model is a great way to bring innovation to day-to-day work and to continue to learn as part of your job. She thinks that setting time aside to do training and upskilling in the areas you’re interested in is great for professional development. Having experienced traditional training approaches that either rush you to get the training done or you require unconditional focus on the training until its completed, Lana thinks that Innovation Day reduces training stress and allows a flexible schedule so that work deadlines can also be met without compromise. She is currently working on Builder courses which are topic-specific to help her with her current work and with the ACP 620 certification.

Jamie Fox our Intern Developer was impressed that New Verve offered such a practice when he joined us in June. He has been able to use Innovation Day to improve his skills and look further into certain areas of product development that he is passionate about. For instance, he is currently going through online tutorials to learn new frameworks. Specifically, he has been doing practical tutorials with React, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. These tutorials involve activities such as creating Tic Tac Toe on a webpage and working on front-end frameworks to help model and display webpages. The frameworks Jamie uses in his enablement are frequently used in the current product (Crumbs: CRM for Jira) the development team are working on and therefore benefit Jamie’s personal professional development and his teams.

Summary

Innovation Day is something we, at New Verve, believe will impact the well-being of our employees while also having a positive outcome on our work. The 4+1 working week structure has received positive feedback from our employees and has helped flourish the innovative learning culture we value at New Verve.

The benefits of empowering employees to take control of their professional development are vast. With the ability to create their unique learning path, in line with company goals, employees gain a sense of fulfilment and growth and New Verve’s work output also advances.

Are you inspired by New Verve’s work culture? Check out our vacancies page here.

Related Reading

If you want to find out more about New Verve’s work culture read our blog on The Importance of Work-Life Balance While Working Remotely.