Challenges - Part 3

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

(In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful)

Challenges - 3

In the previous posts, I mentioned two main challenges faced while establishing the creativity room: The location and the budget. In this post, I will talk about another challenge we faced after establishing the room. This challenge was to convince the staff about the purpose of the room.

It was really difficult to convince department staff that there is something called creativity room.  It might be because the design of the first phase was not that appealing.  Still, the creativity room was somehow different than normal offices and the name of the room was making the place different than others.  However,  it has always been said that changing the culture or what we are used to is considered to be one of the most difficult things to change.

It was a big challenge, so we started – as a team – to put solutions for this challenge. One of the solutions was to market the room. How? We agreed on several steps:

·         - Conduct different activities for all staff in the room.

·        -  Market and advertise the activities before and after conducting them.

·        -  Conduct dedicated activities for department units.

Our main target in this phase was that all staff in the department should participate in at least one activity. Other than that, we wanted all staff to know that there is something called creativity room.

It is also important to mention that the opening ceremony of the room supported marking of it so much since it was opened by the department head and almost all section managers were available in this ceremony beside many employees.

When we started our activities in the room, the number of participants were varying from one activity to another. Some activities were well advertised and marketed, so the number of participants were acceptable while others were not.

Still, not all employees in the department participated in activities even some employees didn’t enter the room at all!!!  This was realized after we conducted a survey among staff to see the utilization of the room. The results were not very satisfying.

Nevertheless, the good news was that although the room was targeting the department only, many external parties knew about the room and were amazed while visiting it. Does that mean that we succeeded in marketing the room? The answer will be in the next post Insha’Allah J