Journey So Far...

It all started with the R&R fortnight event! They had such good ideas and no one could imagine how rewards and recognition could be made into so much fun with quizzes, stars, trees and so on to encourage team members to recognize each other. This triggered the whole idea into my head. I just thought that if so much can be made out from one concept (Recognition), we could make a lot out of Learning and Development too.
L&D had taken up initiatives in the past too. But this time I wanted it to be more of "you talk and get rewarded" rather than "we talk and you listen". I wanted everyone to get a platform where in they don't need to be a part of L&D to conduct presentations or share what they know about Target and Retail. And that's how I thought of this competition.
Once I got the idea, I held a meeting with the L&D team to know if this was feasible and received a positive response from everyone. The main confusion here was if we needed to make this a team event or an individual event. So when we discussed the pros and cons, making the participation as individual turned out to have more pros than cons. Let me give you a few cons of team participation:
1. When it comes to team, it is difficult to decide how many members a team needs to have. Also the question remains should we put them into teams or let them decide? And it goes on...
2. When it comes to a team effort, it becomes harder to judge team members individually. For ex. May be TM 'A' has worked creating the entire ppt but TM 'B' presents it and there is a good chance that a major credit might go to TM 'B'.
3. Time Constraint: When it comes to team participation, it is necessary to hold team meetings to discuss about the presentations and this could become difficult during high volumes. Also not everybody is free at the same time.
Of course, individual participation also has it own consequences but somehow we felt it would be more feasible looking at the above reasons.
I had created a few slides prior to the meeting and once it was finalised that we were going to hold this competition, I started to work on the slides. Trying to make it look more attractive and appealing to the audience was my primary goal. We all knew that we wanted team members to benefit from this activity but at each step, we couldn't help but question ourselves "Are we going to get the participation that we are looking at?", "Will this competition strike a chord with the audience at all?", "How many are actually going to be excited they are getting a chance to prepare their own presentation?" Surely we've got the answers to that by now!
Let me come to the second part of this whole contest. BLOGGING! I am well aware that it sounded strange to most when I spoke about it during the presentation. But I had my own objective behind that too. (Yea I guess now you can strangle yourself if you want..lol!) But let me tell you, Blogging is so much more fun than strangling yourselves or me :D. You get to express yourselves, talk all about your presentation and get good feedback.
So in case anybody wants to take a look at the presentation, you could open it from the link below:
http://www.mediafire.com/?g4nh5g9wktfcd2j

Speaking about giving feedback, here's a question. How many of us actually like the comment  "It was nice" or "You were good" or "Great Job!". To be frank, I personally hate it because I feel you're not conveying the right message through these comments. In fact you're not conveying any message at all. It's as though you had a chat and later remark "It was bad!" to the vendor and he has no idea why it was bad. While a hurtful comment would go like this: "It was very very spicy and the moment I took the odour of the rotten garlic, I thought I was going to throw up". That's an example of a destructive criticism while a constructive criticism could go like this: "I felt it was a bit too spicy and you had added more garlic than required. So next time you could go easy on the chilly powder and the garlic and it might taste a lot better."
So that was some quick tip on giving feedback. Now to get back to the participation, I would like to call out a specific name here. Let me tell you that this was the first entry we received right on the same day that we gave the presentation. It's none other than our "Star of the Month!" Basanthi. We are so proud of you for your active participation. :) Next I would like to call out the other two pro-active team members who also sent their nomination 'without us pushing them to do it' It's Snehalatha and Nithya. You all set standards for us. After that of course we definitely had to take a little effort to encourage a few more team members but at the end of it, it was totally worth the talks ;)
So below is the Participant List:

1.  Basanthi

2.  Sneha

3.  Nithya

4.  Jayanth

5.  Lakshmi

6.  Babitha

7.  Aruna

8.  Pratik

9.  Karan

Best of Luck all of you and also we would be glad to accommodate more team members into this list. It's never late...
Also we are open to any suggestions, you could leave us your feedback and we would work on it.
:)