How Nina’s Growth and Leadership Enhanced Our AI Learning Experience
Our AI Learning Day in 2023 introduced us to various AI and automation tools and provided practical examples of ways each team could implement AI. One successful result of the experience was adopting a 4-day work week due to improved efficiency! However, waning attendance and the need for more structure also highlighted areas for improvement in the next iteration of our digital initiative. Armed with this feedback, one team member stepped up to champion designing our next learning initiative more purposefully. Strategic planning and an empathetic approach to creating the experience with our team made 2024’s AI Learning Day even more impactful.
Setting Strategic Goals for 2024
To successfully design this digital initiative for our team, we needed to clearly define its purpose.
This year, our primary goal was to be intentional with how we spent our AI Learning Day, especially since it meant taking time away from our regular tasks. As we all work remotely, we also wanted to create an engaging online experience to keep our team focused and actively participating.
One of our company’s core values is “perfecting,” which we define as “constantly innovating, reimagining, and improving our processes.” Our learning initiative needed to improve processes that would help us achieve our strategic goals, so we needed to ensure we could define measurable outcomes to evaluate its success.
Our CEO, Arianna Rehak, outlined expectations for the day in an email to the team:
Matchbox has committed to continually hosting learning days like this one because AI adoption does not happen overnight. It’s something to revisit continually, and I believe so strongly in its power because I’ve watched it completely transform my workflow.
- I have a goal for each of you: to learn things tomorrow that will save you an average of 2 hours per week of time. This is a very conservative goal because many of us are already actively using AI tools.
- Once we begin, please put everything else aside for the day. This is the only way to achieve a deep learning experience. If you invest fully in the process, you will more than makeup for the lost time in the coming weeks.
- After the day is over, please make an active effort to keep adoption in mind.
Tailoring the Experience to Our Team‘s needs
To ensure the AI Learning Day was as beneficial as possible, we began by surveying our team. We wanted to understand:
- How often do they currently use AI tools, and what are their comfort levels?
- Their preferred learning styles and the session types that would be most beneficial.
- Specific AI topics they were eager to explore.
Using this valuable input, we crafted a varied agenda to prevent screen fatigue.
We scheduled AI Learning Day from 11 am to 4 pm to strike a balance. This allowed our team members to tend to time-sensitive work in the morning and dedicate their full attention to the AI training sessions for the rest of the day. We also incorporated a lunch break to keep everyone energized and engaged.
Here’s an overview of our agenda:
- Pre-recorded Session: A pre-produced segment to kick off the day.
- Lunch Break: A scheduled pause to reflect and recharge.
- Live Workshop: Interactive AI training with real-time feedback.
- Independent Research Time: Guided by curated AI resources to keep everyone focused and prevent feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to start.
- Live Wrap-Up: A session where participants shared a tangible takeaway they could implement in their work.
We asked each team member to return to the wrap-up session with one actionable insight or task to ensure both engagement and accountability. We recorded these actions and then scheduled check-ins for everyone to share their progress with the team after one week and one month.
Designing Our Online Experience
The Matchbox platform played a crucial role in visualizing the day’s schedule, ensuring a balanced agenda, and serving as a central hub for all AI resources. To create our learning initiative, we applied the template for designing a topic-driven summit, customizing the look and feel with our brand colors and fonts. We could easily adjust the template’s suggested agenda to suit our team’s needs and select various session formats to achieve different learning objectives. We also added a section for on-demand resources. A curated selection of links and documents in this section guided our team’s independent exploration time.
To set the stage for learning together, we included pre-event activities directly in the platform, which recapped insights from 2023’s AI Learning Day and asked the team to:
- Share AI tips and techniques for writing effective prompts.
- Discuss current uses of ChatGPT and suggest potential automation opportunities for each role.
- Collaboratively brainstorm ways to automate mundane tasks.
These pre-event activities encouraged everyone participating to be ready to share ideas and actively engage in discussions during the sessions.
We used the platform chat on the event page to share a pre-event icebreaker and while watching the pre-recorded session on the event day. Both aspects helped keep the team engaged and the conversation flowing.
Impact on Company Culture and Team Development
This year’s AI Learning Day was a resounding success. It provided a structured, engaging, and practical learning experience that enhanced our workflows and company culture.
Another significant outcome of this digital initiative is that the success of our learning day is also reflected in the professional development of our Client Success Manager, Nina Blake. A little over a year ago, we wrote about how “busy work” impacted Nina’s job satisfaction – creating an imbalance of time-consuming, repetitive tasks that were not rewarding. At that time, we employed a framework to analyze these tasks. We found that 100% of them could be automated, giving Nina more time and opportunity to redirect her focus to higher-level skills that would be more impactful for our clients and help her continue her career development. It was this realization that sparked our company’s learning journey with automation and AI, seeking to improve processes and efficiency across all our teams.
It was Nina who called out the shortcomings of our previous AI Learning Day’s design and stepped up to redesign our 2024 AI Learning Day. Because we have implemented automation to free up Nina’s time, in the past year, she has had more time to focus on the parts of her role that allow her to:
- Design, problem-solve, and be more creative
- Connect directly with clients to understand their challenges and share her expertise
- Feel a greater sense of purpose in her role in general
We asked Nina how it felt to design and build her own event. She said, “I love helping my clients! But it did feel really cool to have the final say over all of my decisions. When working with clients, I usually suggest multiple options so they can feel ownership of their choices, and I refrain from getting attached to one outcome. I loved that for this event, I got to feel that ownership!”
Nina’s strategic, purposeful, and empathetic approach to building our AI Learning Day event highlighted her professional development over this year. She applied her skills and experience that help our clients design impactful, engaging online experiences to enhance the effectiveness of our internal digital initiative.
Achieving our strategic outcomes
AI Learning Day 2024 fostered a sense of unity and purposeful learning within our team.
- By recording personal implementation goals and asking how team members could support each other, we ensured active engagement with the online experience and that the outcomes would be measurable.
- We reinforced our company values, gained deeper insights into individual struggles and identified opportunities for automation across all departments in our organization.
- Following this initiative, we have implemented new tools and processes that have improved our teams’ efficiency, collaboration, and effectiveness, aligning with our strategic goals.
AI Learning Day 2024 showed the importance of co-creating the experience with stakeholders, incorporating the input of team members in the design of the event. Also, it shows that measuring the outcomes of a ‘pilot’ initiative and identifying ways in which it can be improved is an essential part of the process. This iterative approach creates a cycle of continuous learning and innovation, which makes it easier to get buy-in from leadership for your first digital initiative, and to improve the success of subsequent initiatives! At Matchbox, we look forward to building on this foundation and continuing our learning journey as a team.
Are you inspired to create a digital initiative to engage your team or members?
Whether you’re aiming to boost team engagement, enhance workflows, or dive into better understanding the latest technology trends, dedicating a day to learning or problem-solving can significantly impact your association.
Our Member Engagement digital initiative resources include:
- Consultation with the Matchbox team to help understand the needs of your team or members and share data-driven suggestions for a truly engaging experience for your team or members;
- Our platform includes intuitive features to simplify the creation of your online learning initiative or member engagement event. Customizable event templates, best practice guides, and features designed to maximize engagement during your online experience;
- Our “Team-Extender” professional services ensure you can deliver a successful digital initiative. Allow us to manage your event, taking the pressure off teams with limited bandwidth!
We’d love to discuss how we can help you build a successful digital initiative for your organization. Let’s take the next step together! Use the form below to schedule a one-on-one demo of our digital initiative modules.
