The event was facilitated by Gavin Oattes from the Tree of Knowledge, who introduced a fun at work approach to a series of activities and workshops. The morning session covered areas such as resilience and change, improving customer services, demonstrating value for money and team building.

Bill Banks, chief executive of Kingdom, said: “The staff study day is a very important part of our business planning cycle and Gavin Oattes was an excellent presenter and facilitator. He managed to get the staff motivated and enthusiastic and the feedback from the staff has been excellent.”

A member of staff who attended the event said: “It was a very enjoyable day, loved the morning session. I enjoyed the way the speaker motivated us and made it exciting.”

Another added: “This was the best staff study day I have ever been to; productive, fun, creative and well organised. It shows the potential of this organisation as well as the wonderful ‘human assets’ in its staff.”

The afternoon sessions continued the theme and staff groups built ‘Kingdom’s Tree of Knowledge’ where staff were able to identify and suggest what was good and not so good at Kingdom, areas for change and opportunities for business development.

Norah Smith, Kingdom’s director of housing & care, devised the format for the afternoon session.

She explained: “The process for building our own Tree of Knowledge was very well received by everyone who attended. It provided the opportunity for staff to feed in their views and help influence our future strategy. Many of the ideas helped reinforce areas currently being considered and others provided new suggestions that we will be able to investigate further, through development of our business plan.”

The event is the first in a series as part of Kingdom’s annual business planning cycle and the suggestions made at the staff study day will be recognised as part of the Management Business Planning day and the Board Strategy event in January.

Input from all the events will be reflected in Kingdom’s updated 2016 Corporate Plan, due to be published around May 2016.

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