How do you combat workshop fatigue or survey fatigue?
How do you combat workshop fatigue or survey fatigue?
Q&A: Workshops and facilitation with Service Design
Preparing a workshop like a service designer
Preparing a workshop like a service designer
Custom workshop Canvases
Custom workshop Canvases
Workshops with a lot of participants
Workshops with a lot of participants
Running and facilitating a workshop like a service designer
Running and facilitating a workshop like a service designer
Creating a workshop report like a service designer
Creating a workshop report like a service designer
Mass participation workshops
Mass participation workshops
Synthesis in Service Design workshops
Synthesis in Service Design workshops
In short:
Ask yourself: could it be in another format?
Involve other people
Make it less serious
Make it shorter or faster
Make it more personal
Embed it within something else
A bit of context first
Workshop fatigue or survey fatigue happens when when people within an organization have seen too many surveys or participated in too many workshops and start to hate these things.
As I slowly notice this trend, I’m also slowly reacting to it. Here are already a few things I’m trying out, but obviously this is just the start of the reflection:
Ask yourself: could it be in another format?
Not every co-creation needs to happen in a workshop. Not every research needs a survey.
Good alternatives to workshops can be:
1:1 co-creation sessions
Making a sort of asynchronous workshop via email, text messages or in a work chat
Sending a structured journal with activities and prompts
Just a classical meeting
Etc.
Good alternatives to surveys can be:
Observation or shadowing
1:1 interviews
Looking at past data (often your questions have already been answered in another survey within your organisation or your industry)
Etc.
Involve other people
Often the fatigue comes from the fact that the same people are asked to do the task again and again. In large organizations look for other people who could give a hand. Maybe ask to the people you wanted to ask to suggest names of other people who are usually forgotten but are still very insightful.
Make it less serious
What’s sometimes painful about workshops or surveys is how much they feel like doing work. What if you made them in a less serious or academically perfect way?
Make it shorter or faster
What if your survey was a one or two-question survey, and that’s it?
What if your workshop took just 15 minutes remotely?
Make it more personal
What if instead of answering a survey, you would answer the personal question of a colleague that he sent personally to you via email?
The researcher then does the heavy lifting of putting the data back together. But as the person answering, you feel the researcher really invested energy and time in the relationship.
This is a technique I’ve often used, and it works really well.
Embed it within something else
The issue with workshops is often finding the time to make them happen. What if you included your workshop within an existing event where people already go? There would be no scheduling nightmare. This works pretty nicely. You can do the same for surveys, using an existing event to survey a crowd of people.
Again, for surveys, what if instead of every department sending a survey whenever they want, you would have a yearly survey for the whole organisation where every department can suggest 1-2 elements they need to research? I’m pretty confident that some departments might have the same research questions.