Consumer Healthcare Major | Engaging a large team virtually

Program

Consumer Healthcare Major | Engaging a large team virtually

Background

Our customer, is one of the largest players in the consumer healthcare industry. The company’s principal activities are to manufacture and distribute a wide range of healthcare foods drugs and pharmaceuticals.

The company in recent times has done remarkably well with products – that have moved from the No.10 to the No.2 slot in their category. The mood in the company was naturally upbeat. To celebrate this fresh new start as a recharged and reinvigorated organization, they had planned a kick-off on 1st April, 2020.

Objective

The objective was to keep the upbeat mood of the team going and inspire team members to hold on to their leadership mindset. A strong kick off activity was needed, to mark the occasion.

Solution

While discussing various options with the client, it was mutually agreed that it would be best if the team comes together and creates an anthem for themselves which can keep inspiring them amidst the major changes as they transitioned. And from there the agreement to do “The MusoMagic Challenge” emerged.

As we knew the “MusoMagic Challenge” then, it required the whole team and the facilitators to be present together and work closely in smaller groups to help participants in writing, singing, and dancing to produce the anthem! As we started to plan for resources, the lockdown happened!

Did we give up? No! Crisis sometimes sparks innovation like nothing else does. What emerged from our brain storming was the first-ever “Virtual MusoMagic Challenge!”

The roll-out involved different steps:

Step 1: Ideation
How do we get 250 employees virtually together to write, sing and act to create an anthem! This was like asking, “How do we eat an elephant?”, and the only answer was “one bite at a time”. We worked with an extremely supportive client to get people on a virtual platform twice – once for creating the lyrics and then for recording it. We further divided the participants into smaller groups to make each virtual session interactive, involving and fun!

Step 2: Planning & Preparation
Ideas are dime a dozen. At the end of the day, it comes down to the rigor in planning and preparation. We played out various scenarios, with some of us working as a “devil’s advocate”, challenging each one of the ideas and suggestions around execution.

Step 3: Getting our co-conspirators on board
To begin with, each day would start with client asking us, “Will this really work? Are you sure the outcome would be inspiring enough for the leadership team to bless it?” Every day, we learned to overcome our own “butterflies-in-the-stomach” to say, “Yes, we can!” Our belief came from the fact that we have always turned around even the most difficult projects successfully. Why would this be different? The fact that the client stakeholders were very supportive was the icing on the cake.

Step 4: Actual Execution
We tapped onto the client’s expectations by asking them to share some existing songs which they liked. This helped us get a cue as to what was there in their mind. From that initial point, we created the “anthem tune”, the skeleton around which the anthem would be fleshed out. Once that was done, the work with 250 participations begun!

It took three full days of working with multiple smaller groups to get them to ideate, write, sing, and act out the song in from of their computer screens!

On Day 1, just the writing happened with people writing down their “stream of consciousness”, which provided the raw material for their lyrics. Each smaller team was tasked with voting and selecting their top three lines and sharing with us. As the day ended, we had enough good lines to turn it around into an anthem lyric. We diligently worked with them translating few into Hindi to make it jazzy!

Day 2 and Day 3 was sheer hard work of working with each smaller group on the virtual platform to get their singing right, record it and make them dance to the tunes! Truth be told, it was not an easy task by any measure – staring at a screen for such long durations of time. But the energy of the participants kept us going and coming back with greater energy next day!

The final output that we created was something that we are so proud of ourselves. If we had been asked a month before we went into a lock-down, whether we could create something like this, we would have perhaps said “No!”

Impact

Here is what Sumi G, (TL&OD Manager) from the client side had to say after this workshop:

“FocusU has been a truly wonderful partner to work with and our experience in collaborating with this fabulous team has been consistently brilliant! At a critical juncture for our organization, we were hit by the onset of the pandemic requiring us to truly be agile to convert our planned engagement from a F2F format to a virtual one connecting almost 300 colleagues. The FocusU team embraced this as a challenge and their sheer efforts to develop a virtual solution that would be eventually run for the very first time in our organization – the MusoMagic challenge – are praiseworthy and actually one in a million! So thank you FocusU!”