Top 10 Pharma.
Massive voice-of-employee workshop
Case Study
At a glance
Digital transformation is music to the ears of the C-Suite, and it is exciting for project teams - but it can be worrying for employees. Questions like "What will I need to re-learn?", "Will I still be needed?" and "Will my ideas be heard?" are just some of the questions on their minds.
As the field of Biostatistics is evolving through technology, our Top 10 Pharma client is in the midst of their own process and system transformations. In their annual internal conference, Whitespace helped them listen to the hopes and fears of key employees - their hundreds of statisticians, data scientists, and programmers.
Client
Top 10 Pharma
Sector
Health & Life Sciences
Project
Employee Experience Workshop
Activities
Workshop design
Workshop facilitation
Technologies
Figma
Miro
Less talk, more listening
The annual biostatistics conference of our client has been evolving due to Covid, and in 2022 it was a 24-hour non-stop hybrid event. Our client, the Technical Innovation team, wanted to use a speaker spot in an innovative way. So instead of simply presenting a recent innovation project, we decided to do a workshop to practice true human-centered design and innovation: listening instead of talking.
After multiple rounds of brainstorming, we settled on the topic of an ongoing digital transformation initiative. This initiative has the potential to transform end-to-end processes, simplifying, automating, and digitizing a lot of work. We wanted to understand the knowledge, hopes, fears, expectations, and ideas of employees around the topic. But how do we listen to potentially hundreds of people...?
Absolutely stellar work!
Programming Director
Follow the sun
Instead of doing one workshop at a single point in time, Whitespace designed a series of 5 mini-workshops. This way we could reach people from Japan to the Americas, following the sun as the 24-hour conference unfolded.
The workshop format was also a welcome change for the conference's audience, who have mostly been hearing presentations, versus having a chance to actively engage.
The mini-workshops followed a common beginning and end, allowing for high-level inputs from everyone. But they also evolved with each round: after each workshop, we summarized the results and presented them to the participants of the next workshop. Thus the participants could build on the thoughts and ideas of those coming before them, while providing input to those following them.
The Whitespace team took our initial idea and ran with it! It was boosted to gather insights and deliver impact well beyond the originally intended scope.
Senior Director, Technical Excellence & Innovations Team Head
Key stats
250+
Participants across the workshops
2
Weeks from concept to delivery
5
Workshops spanning 16 hours
100s
of insights from 5 continents
Peter Horvath
Strategy & Service Design Lead
You have to trust your employees. Not just with doing their work, but with having original thoughts and ideas, and not being afraid to voice them. It was absolutely energizing to give hundreds of statisticians and programmers a forum where they could speak their minds.
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