Collaborate App helps spark discussion on closing the values gap

We were delighted to be working alongside the UK Values Alliance, the team behind World Values Day (WVD) earlier this month, to co-host a highly interactive workshop.  The event brought together over 70 values practitioners to explore how organisations can ‘close the values gap’ and marked the end of a second, very successful World Values Day. 

The aim of the session was to answer a question that many organisations face: how can we behave in everyday business in a way that is consistent with our vision and values?  Utilising our Collaborate App, event organisers were able to crowdsource the best ideas for practical steps to take on closing the gap from the group, and share those instantly to spark discussion.

Chris Elmitt, Crystal’s MD and facilitator for the evening explains, “We were honoured to sponsor World Values Day alongside fellow partners such as PwC and the RSA. As the goal of the evening was to generate practical and implementable solutions to the values gap challenge, capturing, making sense of and prioritising all the best ideas from the 70 people attending was key.

The event was a great success and we got a real buzz from working with such an interactive audience. Our Collaborate technology provided the perfect tool for harnessing the insights of the group in a limited time period. In two hours we were able to generate over 200 insights, 5 priority challenges and 50 solution ideas in order to get real clarity on what prevents organisations from living their stated values in day-to-day life.”

The five priority challenges were identified as lack of authentic dialogue about values and behaviour in organisations, lack of consistent behaviour of senior leaders, lack of understanding of the meaning behind the values, fear of giving feedback and business and moral decision challenges. The 50 solution ideas crowdsourced during the event provided workable responses to these which can be put in to practice.

Delegates also heard from three speakers during the evening, from Peakon, Old Mutual Wealth and The Halo Works, all three provided illuminating insights into the strategies they have employed in their organisations, to close their own values gaps.  Following the presentations delegates formed into small groups to reflect on the advice they had heard and identify and discuss the main challenges to closing the gaps.  The Collaborate App allowed delegates to enter their thoughts, via Crystal’s iPads, which were handed out at the beginning of the session.

Liz Murphy, event host from the UK Values Alliance said, “At events such as these it’s impossible to speak to everyone in the room and allow them to voice their ideas.  With so much great experience in the room we needed to capture all of the ideas in one place, making the most of the collective intelligence of the group.  Crystal’s Collaborate App allowed us to harvest all of these ideas, prioritise emerging themes and create discussion points; all delegates were given a complete set of ideas and results as a great take away.”