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As a meeting and event planning company, Bishop-McCann regularly uses the Ofactor Survey Platform to survey attendees before and after client meetings, incentive programs, or events. The results determine what types of content and activities will be the most relevant and influential during the meeting. Bishop-McCann then carefully designs meeting components—such as keynote presentations, award nights, team building, and so forth—to help build a higher trust culture for clients where the needs are identified.

As the first corporate event planning company to use this platform, Bishop-McCann’s clients benefit by gaining the insights needed to strengthen company trust, improve culture, and increase performance.

Ofactor, trust, team, culture, retreat

Dr. Paul Zak, a neuroscientist and developer of the Ofactor Survey Platform, discovered eight key management behaviors that foster trust within organizations.

  1. Ovation – Recognizing colleagues and celebrating success
  2. Expectation – Defining goals and challenging teams
  3. Yield – Yielding project control to the team
  4. Transfer – Self-direction and leadership
  5. Openness – Transparency 
  6. Caring – Care and support of colleagues
  7. Invest – Career investment
  8. Natural – Honesty and vulnerability

Recently, Bishop-McCann used the Ofactor Survey Solution internally to determine the company’s own employee satisfaction levels.

Earlier this year, a staff retreat was held off site for two days in an effort to improve the scores in a few key areas. The company moved forward to purposefully plan a meeting with the intention of increasing employee celebration, team autonomy, and individual authenticity. 

Rob Adams, Bishop-McCann President and CEO, said he had two main goals in mind. “1. To make sure our people are helping to support the company’s purpose. 2. To create an environment of high trust, leading to less stress, more engagement, and more job satisfaction.”

The meeting planning started by creating a comfortable living room setting with warm, soft seating in a boutique hotel location. “We wanted the environment to mimic the culture—open and comfortable, making employees feel as if they were getting a big hug from the company,” Adams said.

Concentrating on the eight key
behaviors that foster trust, Bishop-McCann created specific activities designed
to increase employee engagement and overall happiness.

Ovation

“We knew we had to do a better job celebrating people,” Rob said. “So, we made sure we integrated an awards ceremony to acknowledge our top performers.” Employees who feel appreciated and recognized are more energized and motivated, along with being able to see progress in their work. This is one of the best predictors of a sense of personal accomplishment.

Expectation

“In the pre-meeting survey, we discovered that Bishop-McCann employees loved the company’s mission statement but found it hard to relate to. It’s not just what Bishop-McCann does, but it’s how each individual employee is impacting the world by being a part of the Bishop-McCann team that makes the difference.” At the retreat, Rob shared a graph showing not just the company numbers, but how each team member had made a difference and helped to create those numbers. He established a direct correlation between the business goals and the individual’s goals.

Clients were invited to participate in a panel, and each one talked about how Bishop-McCann employees had made an impact on the people within their different organizations. This reinforced the message of purpose to the staff. Employees who have clarity on how their individual goals have a clear “line of sight” to organizational strategic goals and are given benchmarks for achieving those goals are significantly more productive.

Yield

Yield is characterized in high-trust organizations as actively empowering decision making and fostering independence. Company leaders participated in a leadership panel during the retreat where employees were encouraged to ask anything, being completely transparent and discussing ways leaders could provide more support when required.

Transfer

Breakout sessions for teams during the retreat focused on how they could do a better job supporting and empowering one another. By creating self-directed, empowered teams and providing those teams with the resources and tools they need to get the job done, employees achieve better results.

Openness

A communication training session during the retreat focused on how open staff was with one another and ways that sharing knowledge and information could be improved upon.

Caring

Fostering friendships, cooperation, and teamwork served as the building blocks of all of the activities across the two days as employees consistently collaborated and worked together. An after-hours party was also planned to facilitate joy and build upon those peer relationships.

Invest

When employees are bought into the company’s goals, they are engaged. During the retreat, career growth and professional development were top of mind as employees and leaders discussed industry trends, forecasts, and future goals.

Natural

To increase the Natural score, Rob Adams delivered a relaxed and open keynote address, sharing his background and childhood stories with employees. “We realized that people needed to get to know me better and understand why I’m making certain decisions.” The feedback after the retreat was unanimous. Employees felt as though they got to know Rob as a human being instead of just as a CEO.

The post-retreat scores showed a significant jump (more than 10%) in all eight of these behaviors. “We were very intentional in increasing these scores,” Rob relayed. “And that is the beauty of the Ofactor survey method. It makes planning meetings much more purposeful.”

Melanie Maddock, Vice President of Talent and Culture for Bishop-McCann, shared, “There are great benefits in using the insights from a platform like Ofactor. It’s helped us better understand the health of our organization and played a key role in the development of our culture strategy.”

Moving forward, Rob wants to learn how these results impact client satisfaction. Bishop-McCann plans to do another employee survey mid-year. These internal results would then be compared with client surveys to see if there is a direct correlation after a meeting or corporate event planned and managed by the company.

About Ofactor

The Ofactor organization was founded in 2014 to help businesses increase employee and company performance, along with engineering high-trust, high-performance cultures. The Ofactor Survey Solution is the result of 13 years of research by Dr. Paul Zak—a neuroscientist who, through his research and work in the lab and in the field, demonstrated empirically how greater trust within organizations leads to better organizational performance.

About Bishop-McCann

Bishop-McCann is an industry leader producing meetings, incentive programs, and events worldwide. Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, with offices in Chicago and San Francisco, Bishop-McCann combines Midwest culture and values with agency expertise to create a unique working experience.

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