WELL-BEING AT WORK

 THE NEW CHALLENGE OF THE SEMINARS ! 

AUTHENTIC ESCAPE ENLIGHTENS YOU…

With over 15 years of experience in the event business, industry, Marianne Isaia, creator of the Authentic Escape Agency, looks back on the last years of work and experiments, sharing with us through 4 elements, the keys of the new seminars’ challenge: the well-being at work.

 
  
  

 

AN INSPIRING PLACE

The important question when planning a seminar is: Where? You must consider that the environment in which you are going to lead your work team will be decisive. The environment imprints our minds and cunningly suggests the rest of the program of your seminars. As a gift-wrapping, it makes you want to be there; it arouses your curiosity, interest, and leads the delegates towards the dynamic that you wish to give to your seminar. Back to the authenticity! From my own experience, leaving a cold, urban and impersonal work environment, even for a short stay, being close to nature will enable to your work co-workers of being away from the usual working environment. The message is: "This seminar is a break, a way to be turned off from your daily work tasks, to take stock, to exchange and share together." Recently, many places have understood this development. Indeed, we meet regularly vineyards, farmhouses, former abbeys reinventing themselves or diversifying their services offering to the companies’ perfect work areas, more inspiring and more turned to nature. They create favorable conditions to facilitate the exchange and good concentration focus. At Authentic Escape, we like to call these locations "inspiring places”. For an employee or a manager, staying in one of these places during a seminar, allows them necessarily at letting go and to the reflection, away from the office and its issues.


A PROGRAM DIRECTED TO A MORE HUMAN MANAGEMENT

Encouraging reflection…Ok, but to what?

Generally, the business world is changing; suicides in the big companies in the early 2000s, and several burnouts in 2015 demonstrate and oblige us to adopt new methods for the business environment. What about re-humanize the professional relationships?
Your seminars should have two well-defined objectives: sharing information and allowing your team to be out of a strict and codified framework. That will help to express the personality of each member of your team. Since the goal is common, why don’t you look for a relaxing environment that will facilitate exchanges and communication? For a CEO, there is real value in promoting both personal and professional growth. Sharing, laughing, discussing, analyzing in a meeting room in the morning, and then taking part in-group activities in the afternoon: This is what we call a fantastic management tool !


CLOSE TO NATURE LEISURES

A common activity during a seminar, what we use to call a “team building”, has to be the key element of your event. Still very appreciated by the participants for whom this moment is an opportunity for relaxing and having fun, the team building moment is a very efficient way to give meanings to your brainstorming meetings. You would like to highlight the fighting spirit of your team? Let us plan for them a sporting challenge and help them in building their competitive streak. This is only an example: the possibilities are endless. The most important thing is to keep in mind the profile of your team. Generally speaking, leisures related to nature are highly prized. Discovering and exploring natural wonders allows to stand back from day-to-day pressures. This moment of reflection is particularly suitable during the seminar. However, pay attention to the type of team building activity! Some are wacky or over-ambitious, you should just keep it simple in order to please the widest possible and take the best from each delegate.
In most cases, the team building activity will punctuate your morning meeting. If you neglect it to dedicate the whole seminar to your meeting would not optimize or encourage the letting go of your staff.

PEOPLE NEED A DIGITAL DETOX

“Happiness is when time stops”Gilbert Cesbron.

Expand our reflection of the return of well-being at work through the seminar is considering a full step back. Make sure that the seminar is not a spiritual but an occupational break. A real disconnection for a total reconnection with yourself and your team. To give substance of this idea, the three preceding items are essential. For disconnecting paradoxically, you would have to use a technique that's been sounding: the digital detox! “Ladies and Gentlemen, please switch off your connected devices for all the duration of the seminar"! Could you imagine a leader introducing his seminar that way? Yet, on second thought, that may not seem so absurd. In our hyper-connected world, human values are lost. However, a seminar is a group of people who tries during one or more days several close dialogues on common issues, finding solutions together. The smartphones constitute a real barrier to the human interactions. Who has never been polluted by his smartphone, which keeps ringing and vibrating during a lunch-break? It is the best way of losing your staff’s attention during a key speech of one of your speaker, the speaker himself can be distracted by the incessant vibrations of a smartphone!

Those devices are taking control of our schedules and our lives, they has become so omnipresent in our lives that they contradict the truest sense of the word “exchange”. We do believe in this idea of exchange, we are trying to push this concept in an authentic and inspiring atmosphere during our seminars.

Forget the over-digitalization for a seminar duration and let’s organize seminars based on real human relationships! You will learn more about your co-worker who shares your office for 3 years than your 500 Facebook friends !

Article written by Charline DUCAT, event manager at Authentic Escape from the testimony of Marianne ISAIA, creator of Authentic Escape.