The Training Team loves tackling slightly impossible projects, such as preparing 600+ people in various roles on product launches and improvements for five product lines that won’t be finalized until a few days before a conference with about a month to plan. THIS IS WHAT WE LIVE FOR.
With this project, we designed a four-pronged strategy:
- Company-wide Pep Rally featuring interviews and explanations by engineers, product owners, marketing leadership, and sales managers.
- Audience-specific training sessions on the largest changes.
- Physical and virtual Office Hours leading up to conference.
- Up-to-date library of release notes and video walkthroughs.
The most intricate piece of this strategy was the Pep Rally. We wanted to showcase the products AND the people behind them. The Training Team believed that a multidisciplinary approach at a high level was important for every employee to experience, regardless of your role. Every sales professional should know some basic technical stats, every tech support should know why we’re selling a particular product, and every role that doesn’t interact with partners should know how and why we’re improving the experience for partners.
To pull this off, myself and productions organized a schedule of interviews, predetermined questions, and set up a green screen studio. We pre-recorded a number of interviews beforehand to best organize ourselves on game day, as well as trim and edit the video to make our guests sound awesome. We made sure to spotlight people who don’t get a lot of airtime but have a large impact on our organization.
On game day, we queued up videos, superimposed a background on the green screen, threw on a bow tie, and turned on the all-company broadcast. We had coordinated with our event planner to have a candy bar in several offices and banners hung to amp up excitement, so while I was yukking away on video, employees were mingling and learning about the company in ways they don’t typically get to experience.
The Pep Rally also served as a great marketing technique for our internal employees to make use of our other three resources. The audience-specific trainings were packed, our office hours were visited by employees from every time zone we inhabit, and our library of resources was the most visited page on the company intranet.
It’s how we tackle slightly impossible projects: with a little pep.