Facilitating online remote workshops across time zones

Challenge

Organising and facilitating a series of remote workshops with 40 stakeholders in 15 different locations to help our client, Chiesi, develop a service offering around 2 of their surgical cardiology drugs.

Approach

Our front end innovation specialists spent time on exploratory research to really understand the patient journey, experiences and pain points. Our experts then brought these insights to life by creating visuals to immerse participants in the workshop sessions. Following this work, the project team used a variety of online collaborative tools, such as digital whiteboards and virtual breakout rooms, to deliver workshops at various locations across time zones.

Outcome

Through exploratory user research and workshops, we successfully encouraged collaboration between global teams at Chiesi, shared knowledge, forged connections and created a 360° service strategy for better engagement with their customers.

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A full service offering for two surgical drug products

Chiesi wanted to focus on a service offering around 2 of their surgical drug products, which would involve training for surgeons, education of patients, improving rehabilitation etc. To achieve this, they needed to develop greater synergy between their marketing affiliates and partners around the world and encourage them to work as a single coherent team to develop new innovative ideas.

Team Consulting supported Chiesi and undertook:

• Exploratory user research with healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients to gather insights around the patient journey through a cardiac surgical procedure. We explored processes, experiences, behaviours and emotions to highlight pain points and challenges

• Close collaboration with Chiesi to prepare for the workshops in detail, planning for multiple remote workshops, each with a different focus and objective

• Facilitated a series of 4 remote workshops of 4 hours each with 40 attendees based in 3 locations in the United States and 11 locations in Europe

person-hosting-an-online-workshop

Workshop 1

Creating an opportunity for the global marketing teams to get to know each other and work together

Workshop 2

Sharing experiences across the different teams in various locations to find common grounds to build on going forward

Workshops 3 and 4

Exploring innovative solutions to create brand awareness and improve the customer experience

Exploratory user research: immersing ourselves in the
patient journey

During this preparatory research, we worked with patients, cardiologists and anaesthetists to look at the whole patient journey from first symptoms, through admission to hospital, surgical procedure, discharge and follow up care.

We performed remote interviews at 2 locations and in the interviewees’ native languages (English and Italian). It was important to present the output of this research in a highly visual and immersive manner to make it engaging for the 40 stakeholders attending the workshops later on. We used sketches, images and quotes to tell the story of the user journey, often bringing different views of the same experience from the eyes of both patients and HCPs.

Facilitating workshops across time zones

Our front end innovation specialists worked closely with the Chiesi team to plan and prepare the workshops. We performed pre-workshop interviews with various stakeholders to gather key insights which informed the structure and content of the sessions and promoted active participation. In addition, we ensured that all participants were engaged beforehand by sending them briefing packs. This preparation work encouraged early buy-in from the attendees and allowed the workshops to be as effective as possible.

In between the workshops, we collected feedback from attendees and tweaked them as we went along. This flexible approach ensured the sessions were productive. In addition, individual and group exercises were given in between sessions to gather inspirational material in preparation of creative activities.

Despite the very high number of participants at 14 different locations, we wanted the workshops to be interactive, so we used several digital tools such as Miro and the use of breakout rooms to engage with every single attendee.

Outcome

Through these workshops, we have helped our client develop greater synergy between various stakeholders at different locations by encouraging them to share experiences and learn from each other. Through these new connections, the teams at Chiesi were able to work together to create multiple ideas that could improve the service around their surgical cardiology drugs and unify their offering.

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