We had our staff conference last Friday and after posting a photo of the empty ballroom when I arrived at 7:30am on Facebook, a colleague in BC asked for some of my thoughts on different aspects of the conference including how we plan it, what our budget is and our agenda for the day.
Here’s some thoughts in no particular order…
– When I started at RPL last fall, the conference was well on its way to being planned so I didn’t have as much to do with the planning. This year, I was the conference committee chair so it was a lot more of “my show”.
– the conference is mandatory for all staff (unless they are students or have another obligation) and is the one non-holiday day of the year when all branches are shut down.
– the purpose of the conference is education, development and team-building where we try to bring a mixture of speakers and other elements that will provide a good balance for staff from across the library – from our professional librarians and senior managers on through to our LA’s, clerks, pages and support workers in various capacities from marketing to HR to IT to the maintenance folks. (And yes, accomplishing that balance is as hard as it sounds!)
– our committee starts planning the conference about six months in advance. We meet once a month and then more frequently as the conference gets closer with one final debrief a few weeks after the conference is over. (For that reason, you could technically say that we have a 12-month planning cycle and for some things – like booking high demand speakers – I do usually tentatively do this, even before the comittee has its first meeting in the spring.)
– the committee has about eight members drawn from across the system – one manager, someone from the Director’s office, a couple from marketing, one from IT, one from our Development Office.
– right now, the date of the conference isn’t fixed but I’m hoping to change that so the date can be part of our list of “branch closures” day and all staff know well in advance that the conference is “third day of October” or whatever since some people weren’t able to attend because they signed on for different things long before our date was set this year.
– as for the day itself, here’s one way to tell how it develops: I use a file naming system where I sequentially number files everytime I make a significant change to them. The Word document that outlined our Staff Conference program went through twelve iterations in six months as we added sessions, changed sessions, withdrew sessions, revamped sessions, etc.
– these changes could be as minor as changing the name of a session (okay, that might not get saved as a new file name) to something as major as an endnote speaker canceling and us having to re-jigger the program completely or changing the main theme of the conference (both of which happened this year)
– in terms of budget, I won’t get into specifics here but I will say that it is a decent amount of money that allows to book a fairly pricey keynote speaker, pay most of our other speakers (and their expenses if they come from out of province), provide lunch for all staff (do the math – convention centre hot lunch x 200 staff), provide a gift worth around $5-$10 to each staff member (t-shirts, mugs, day planners in the past, this year was an RPL-branded USB drive) and cover various other miscellaneous expenses related to running the conference.
– This year’s theme was originally “What’s Your Story? The Library In Your Life” and morphed into “Chapter One: A New Beginning” as speakers were booked (and canceled!) and which was probably a better fit as it reflected what’s happening at RPL with us having recently finished implementing a major staff reoganization and moving into a new Service Plan.
– For our final program, the day went like this:
9:00 – Introduction of New Staff
9:05 – Brief update on what’s happening at RPL from our Director and Deputy Director
9:15 – “Focus on the 90%” – Darci Lang, Motivational Speaker
10:15 – Break
10:30 – Breakout #1 – “Our New Service Plan” – update from our managers
10:30 – Breakout #2 – “Customer Service: Good to Great” – Gloria Obrigewitsch, GCO Consulting
11:30 – Manager Q&A – various managers answer questions that are pre-submitted by staff
11:55 – Greetings From Board Chair
12:00 – Hot Lunch
1:00 – Breakout #3 – “Personal Leadership” – Renate Donnovan, Emergence Consulting
1:00 – Breakout #4 – “The Canadian Book Industry: A Snapshot” – Jillian Bell, Sask Publishers Group
2:00 – Break
2:30 – “What Libraries Look Like Now” – Brigitte Richter, Toronto Public Library
3:20 – Long Term Service Awards, Door Prizes, Draw For “Day Off With Pay”, United Way 50/50 Draw and Silent Auction Winners (Units and Branches Can Put Together A Gift Basket That Everyone Can Bid On)
4:15 – Farewell
– the speakers come from suggestions from committee members, from other staff and in some cases (when I have to find a speaker at the last minute because someone canceled!), people I know personally.
– as much planning as you put into it, there will always be things that go wrong. But the other thing I’ve learned from planning a lot of different events and conferences over the years is that most people won’t even realise something’s wrong because they don’t know what was supposed to happen.
– part of this is that there are always some things you simply can’t control – inevitably some speakers won’t use up their time while others will go long. (I was happy that we ended almost exactly on time this year – maybe even a couple minutes early!) When I scheduled the author stage at Word on the Street in Calgary, my fear was always that someone wouldn’t even show up (which happened once – luckily, the MC was prepared and pitched in with some of their own work!)
– we had a long-time employee and committee member whose last day was staff conference day so, as a surprise, we called her up at the end of the day, put up a photo of her on the projection screens and gave her a bouquet of flowers from the conference committee. Then, I held up my iPhone to the podium mic and played her out to “Conga” by Miami Sound Machine (she’d joked earlier in the week that she’d lead a conga line out of the conference for her last day!) There were a few little touches like that through-out the day to hopefully personalize the event and make it more fun and memorable – things that I think are as important if not more than some of the “real” content of the day.
– we use an online feedback form – I prefer it to a paper copy that you give out at the end of the day for a couple reasons – more environmentally friendly, people have had time to think about the experience over the weekend rather than rushing to fill it out before going out the door, all ratings and responses are compiled automatically and can be assessed or shared as needed.
– we always get a mix of feedback (often saying the exact opposite of what someone else said – “This venue was great”, “This venue sucked”, “The day was too long”, “I wish the day was longer”, etc.), I’m happy to say that the very first comment I heard when I got to my office door on Monday morning was a long-term staff member who said she just had to tell me that it was “the best staff conference she’d been to in her time at RPL!” Sweet! 
Hope that covers it and is useful to anyone else out there in library land planning (or hoping to plan) their own staff conference. Any questions?
