As part of their annual employee engagement week, Holiday Extras (travel technology company) wanted to provide a platform for their staff to share stories, knowledge, ideas and insights which were important to them. 

An open invite was sent to all employees to invite them to participate.  A Q+A session was also hosted for anyone who wanted to find out more about the programme before committing.  Both senior leaders and junior executives came forward – with everything from stories of personal growth and resilience, insights to inspire new wellbeing initiatives, humorous ‘lessons learnt’, educational and charitable causes, and inspiring approaches to relatable work challenges. 

A 5 session coaching programme was delivered, empowered participants to deliver TEDx style talks in front of their colleagues, to kick off the employee engagement week in style.  Some participants never spoken before, and others who were regular speakers. The reasons for participating ranged from personal challenges to overcoming their public speaking fears, wanting to inspire others and/or take action and chance something as a silver lining to challenges they’d experienced, having a important cause they were passionate about, wanting to gain skills and confidence in their speaking, and being inspired to teach people what they’d learnt,

The event was a great success – setting a tone of openness, authenticity and courage for the rest of the weeks events.  Many attendees commented it was one of their favourite events of the week (which included talks from professional speakers) – as it was great to see their colleagues up on stage, sharing very relatable stories, and showing immense courage. The senior leaders who participated commented how great it was to hear the experiences of and work with younger team members, while also getting the opportunity for themselves to explore how to present in a new, empowering style.  For more junior participants they commented how they benefited from learning from senior leaders, but also seeing how they were ‘just like them’; sometimes also struggling or getting nervous. 

Auratus (business management consultancy) were hosting their annual international conference, and wanted a range of their top leaders, clients and suppliers to share their knowledge in TEDx style talks. 

Delivered online and working across multiple international time zones – the group of 14 leaders took part in a fortnightly programme across 10 weeks.  During the sessions they were pushed to delve deep into the core value and insights their experience had to offer; on topics of leadership, time and resource management, collaboration, feedback and long term success.  This knowledge they then distilled into a 10min talks; a lot shorter, and completely different style, to what they were used to. 

At the conference, their talks were well received – with one speaker even commenting his talk connected so well that a few of the audience members even shed a tear!  Many of the leaders commented on how much progress they noticed in each other over the duration of the programme – and how especially nice it was to see the confidence growth in the slightly newer leaders.