Let’s Get Real: Building a thriving hybrid working environment

Building on the findings of Culture24’s recent survey of over 95 different cultural organisations into the impact of hybrid on working practices, our most recent groundbreaking Let’s Get Real (LGR) action research programme focused on navigating the challenges of hybrid working to help your organisation become more inclusive and resilient. Discover some of the challenges and opportunities facing the sector through case studies and keynote speakers at our upcoming online seminar on 12 May.

Project Duration: June 2022 to January 2023 (eight months)

The programme was run in partnership with Birmingham Museums Trust and began in June 2022. We brought a cohort of 9 organisations together to discuss the challenges and to collaborate to develop tactics that can exploit the opportunities offered by hybrid working.

The kind of issues organisations experimented with included: 

• improving communication and planning using collaborative digital tools
• designing hybrid programmes of work that mix physical and digital
• increasing digital skills, literacies and confidence within your organisation
• changing the rhythm of how you work
• ways hybrid working support the diversification of audiences online
• exploring the best ways to use shared hybrid spaces
• understanding staff wants, needs and expectations around hybrid working

Participants were guided by Culture24’s experienced leadership team Jane Finnis and Anra Kennedy, working in partnership with Zak Mensah, Birmingham Museums Trust co-CEO and Culture24 trustee. The programme called on a range of guest speakers from within and beyond the cultural sector who contributed their expertise and helped us to create a supportive, engaged community of peers with a shared sense of purpose. You can discover more of the opportunities and challenges faced by the sector in this recording of our recent ‘Hybrid hertiage’ seminar, featuring lead speaker Zak Mensah and guests, Lisa Westcott Wilkins, Co-founder and Managing Director of DigVentures and Mark Bishop, Director of Customer & Cause at the National Trust for Scotland.

Navigation:
Structure of the programme | What does it cost? | What do you get for the money? | What is the commitment for me and my organisation? | What are Culture24 & Birmingham Museum Trust’s roles? | Who is it for? | What will my organisation gain by participating? | Let’s Get Real history

Structure of the programme

Culture24 has reimagined Let’s Get Real’s pre-pandemic, in-person workshop structure – all content was delivered online this time. This approach reflects the practical and accessibility benefits of online delivery and also responds to the reality of financial pressures the sector is facing by cutting participation and travel costs. We held an in-person event towards the end of the programme and encouraged participants to meet up with each other in person when and where they could.  

The Let’s Get Real methodology is based on:

• Learning from others – LGR brings in a variety of voices and perspectives from within and beyond the cultural sector, to inform, support, guide and reflect on the challenges at hand
• Learning by doing – LGR encourages practical action research. We support participants to experiment in the context of their everyday work, testing out hunches developed through our collaborative discussions. This is a different type of R&D. It is innovation from the inside, using what they already have and trying to make more of it
• Learning together – LGR creates a community of supportive peers with a shared sense of purpose. We actively seek out ways to foster and promote collaborative exchange, combining and analysing people’s wealth of individual experiences, expertise and knowledge, turning them into invaluable shared sources of understanding for their peers across the arts and heritage sector.

The programme was a mixture of online workshops (a mixture of theory, content, discussion and participatory activities); support sessions with expert advisors; drop-in trouble-shooting sessions and drop-in social opportunities. See below for a detailed breakdown. 

We used a private online community space on the Mighty Networks platform to host all resources, conversations and programme events information. Gathering in this way gave us the foundation for a rewarding, friendly, accessible and supportive community of practice.

What did it cost?

The cost of participation started at £550 plus VAT for small organisations and went up to a maximum of £1250 plus VAT for large national organisations. There were also two subsidised places on offer at £180 plus VAT each and a 10% discount for participants in our last LGR: 10 Years On. 

Let’s Get Real: Building a thriving hybrid working environment was based on a collaborative funding model where each participating organisation contributed towards the overall cost of the project. This model represents significant value for money for each participant, due to the high cost of accessing expert advice, the huge value derived from shared learning across the project cohort and the practical guidance on embedding long term organisational change.  

The cost is based on a sliding scale as follows:

Using this sliding scale for participants was the fairest way to encourage a cross-section of participating organisations, including smaller ones. We felt it was important that this project was accessible to these organisations. 

What did they get for their money?

This was an eight month programme which ran from June 2022 to the end of January 2023. Two members of staff from each organisation had the chance to participate in the following sessions:

• 6 x participatory online workshops
  • Workshop 1 – Wednesday 15 June 2022, 10 to 12pm
  • Workshop 2 – Thursday 16 June 2022, 2 to 4pm
  • Workshop 3 – Wednesday 6 July 2022, 2 to 4pm
  • Workshop 4 – Monday 12 September 2022, 2 to 4pm
  • Workshop 5 – Monday 5 December 2022, 2 to 4pm
  • Workshop 6 – Thursday 26 January 2023, full day
• 2 x additional guest content sessions
• 3 x troubleshooting sessions on key themes 
• 5 x support sessions for each pair of participants – to help as the cohort tested out practical, small-scale experiments
• 7 x monthly informal drop in coffee hours, for general queries, support requests and chance to chat with a member of the LGR project team and wider cohort
• Membership of our Let’s Get Real online community platform that underpins all the elements and keeps everything connected with resources, links and conversation
• Opportunity for additional staff in the participating organisations to access and watch selected workshops and content sessions.

Whilst we encouraged everyone to attend the sessions live, especially the six workshops, we also shared recordings and workshop overview for catch-up too via Mighty Networks.  

Not included in the cost was the cost of the cohort’s time plus any internal or external costs needed to support their own research experiments.

What was the commitment for individuals and organisations?

• Two nominated participants were able to attend all workshops, content and troubleshooting sessions and relevant support sessions, together. 
• They committed to a minimum of 11 days staff time across the project – approximately 2 days per month – to run experiments in their setting, (June to December) plus attendance at the online sessions outlined above. 
• Support of leadership to participate fully in the project was necessary, to embed any appropriate learning back into the organisation and share learning more widely with the sector
• Commitment to support, encourage and provide advice to fellow peers within the project
• Commitment to be open and honest and work experimentally and collaboratively both as part of the project cohort and also within their own organisations
• Commitment to share their learning from their experiments and participation back with the Culture24 team, which we shape into case studies for the sector.

What was Culture24’s role?

• Programme and content design and delivery
• Hosting of the online sessions (workshops, content, support and troubleshooting) and access to all recorded presentations (for the duration of the project)
• Write-up of content and approaches for publication in the cohort’s community space
• Coordination of the group’s shared communication channel through Mighty Networks 
• Coordination of all external experts at workshops to present their thinking, provide strategic advice and facilitate sessions as appropriate
• Analysis and sharing of insights and data from the research
• The writing and production of a final project report for publication and advocacy

What was Birmingham Museum Trust’s role?

• Zak Mensah, co-CEO of the Trust, advised and supported with programme design and content
• Birmingham Museums Trust played an active part in the community of practice, participating as one of the cohort organisations.

Who was Let’s Get Real: Building a thriving hybrid working environment for?

This programme was for museums, galleries, heritage and arts organisations (or other creative industries) that wanted to navigate and better understand the challenges and opportunities of hybrid working to help their organisation become more inclusive and resilient.  

We gathered a diverse mix of roles, subject focus and organisational type within this group. In most cases, one of the two people participating on behalf of their organisations were a decision-maker, manager or senior leader of some kind and the other was a practitioner, someone working with (not exclusively, by any means) digital tools or channels within their role. 

The programme was suited for people who want the support, inspiration and motivation to tackle the issues around hybrid work as part of a collaborative community of practice. We worked with the cohort to develop their personal practice and supported them to reflect on ways of applying their learning to embed lasting change within their organisation.   

We have found that taking part in LGR projects works just as well for small, medium or larger organisations as lots can be learned from collaborations across different types of practice, expertise, contexts, leadership and approaches to change and risk.

What did the participating organisations gain?

• A deeper understanding of what successful hybrid working means for their organisations strategically, in relation to mission and purpose and practically, looking at ways of tracking, measuring and analysing the challenges and then using those insights to guide digital decisions  
• Tactics for effecting and embedding positive organisational change – participants were supported to reflect on their current practice, design small-scale experiments to develop their learning and explore practical opportunities to embed insights and new ways of working back into the organisation
• A CPD opportunity to build the personal confidence, understanding and digital literacy of the two participating individuals. They had the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from a supportive, engaged community of peers with a shared sense of purpose and to develop the confidence, language and digital literacies necessary to become agents for change within their own organisations 
• The opportunity for other staff members to access and view presentations from the programme in order to share the learning more widely within teams 
• The opportunity to develop strategic influence within the wider arts and heritage sector.

Let’s Get Real history

Since 2010 Culture24’s Let’s Get Real collaborative action research programme has involved 250+ organisations and 380+ participants; generated 10 action research projects, 8 conferences, 700+ conference attendees, 6 published reports and 34,000+ report downloads. In 2020/21 we switched the programme to online delivery. Each LGR explores a different question around digital change for arts and heritage organisations. You can download the reports from previous projects.

Project Duration: June 2022 to January 2023 (eight months)

More about Let’s Get Real