At Active Peers AI, we facilitated an Away Day for Accountant Online recently.

Larissa Feeney and Susan from our team sat down to co-create the overall design of the day. We used our algorithm to generate diverse table plans. Our Peer Learning Prompter was used to stimulate experience sharing and offering different perspectives. Our tailored feedback forms brought the tacit knowledge right to the surface.

Further, together we cultivated a sense of “we genuinely want to hear your thoughts” through interviews with Larissa Feeney FCA and her superb senior leadership team Rose Kervick Nelmari Finlay and Tom Francis with some tough questions to articulate what may have been on people’s minds. We enabled group wide chats too so that everybody could hear the main points from the various teams in the business.

If you are intending to run an Away Day, it’s worthwhile to factor in the principles that Accountant Online brought right into the heart of the session.

💡It’s a very good idea to bring your team together to work towards outputs and let ideas surface in the room.

💡Structure is important when you want to arrive at an unstructured outcome. Work out what you want and then come backwards.

💡In a high growth environment, people may not always know the other people they’re impacting or who are influencing their respective work. Give them a formal way to informally meet.

💡Be open to what your staff have to say – listen to them, acknowledge them, turn what they say into action, communicate why things do and don’t happen.

💡Changes in culture start with clear messages, positive action from the top and an understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

💡Be curious about your customers’ reaction and be hungry to delight the client.

💡Allow the energy of your people to drive conversations about ideas, overcoming problems, looking to the future etc.

💡Maximise the diversity in your environment to bring ideas to the fore.

Thank you so much to all the team for being a pure delight and we are very excited to see how the conversations that day are going to turn into ever growing success!