The Government Art Collection.
Enjoyable? Productive?? Fun??? - Teambuilding days can work.
Beginning.
The Collection promotes British art and plays a key role in its cultural diplomacy, delivering an expression of Britain’s soft power, its culture and its values. It is committed to ensuring wider public access to its works of art through loans, partnerships, public programmes, online access, exhibitions and events.
We had worked with GAC several years ago to help them create and deliver tours and we had been planning new tour training for their new home at Old Admiralty Building. Delays and Covid lockdowns had led to postponements and resulted in new needs we could meet. The Deputy Director was leading 3 sessions (online) with her staff - 'GAC Reset’. The sessions needed to cover process and procedures but she also wanted to welcome new starters into the team, to reacquaint everyone with each other, to inject some positivity and to revisit and bring to life their purpose and values.
Middle.
With 5 days notice we put together a set of activities that were easy to achieve online, interactive and enjoyable but that also developed their thinking and engaged them with their values. Since the team had been away from each other for several months the first activity reminded them of what they enjoy at work, the importance of one role to another and to show the strength and fondness between them.
We sent small groups in to breakout rooms to talk over the values, to reflect on what was relevant to them now or out of date and irrelevant, what stood out as something to focus on and aspire to. The prompts led to rich discussion to define their values in ways that meant something to them and could be used practically.
Drawing on their discussions individuals then wrote postcards from imagined visitors to the GAC in the future. The text demonstrated how the values could be realised for users of the GAC, through the various means of accessing the collection. The participants enjoyed the process of both illustrating, writing and reading their post-cards.
End.
The team left the 2 hours feeling engaged, inspired and informed. Enhancing the team's connections to one another was also recognised as invaluable. Following the difficulty and uncertainty of Covid 19, the session initiated a sense of hope and growth.
