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In a Meeting

Corporate &
Employee
Forums

Corporate and employee forums are groups of 6 to 10 people from one company or organization, who meet periodically and use a structured agenda. They run a protocol similar to YPO forum, but professionally focused. We handle all the administrative details, forum training, and facilitation.

START BY CHOOSING THE OUTCOME

Forum programs solve specific pain points inside companies, and the program we design changes depending on which one you are solving.

  • Want two teams to collaborate better? We create blended forums and guide the content toward empathy.

  • Want to stabilize your teams before a big transition, merger or acquisition? At our pilot client, a healthcare consultancy, 100 people were in forum across two years and two left the company.

  • Want to onboard a new acquisition? We forum-ize the teams for a year.

  • Want to offer ongoing, fascinating professional development? We run education forums, and you can forum-ize your audience for any keynote speaker.

 

Step one is deciding which challenges we are solving.

PROGRAM DESIGN

Once we know what we are solving for, we design peer groups to match the outcome. We help you socialize the idea and test it with your team, and we join your change management with communications and Q&A sessions.
We help you, or a member of your team, choose the first groups, draft the communications, check for conflicts and schedule the meetings. We have the content ready to go.

Corporate Forum Participation
(The people in each forum)

Diagonal

Diagonal Forum membership creates a communication multiplier that occurs between different titles, levels, and departments. This forum membership selection expands collaboration across silos and authority levels.

Horizontal

Horizontal Forums along management or suite levels are often the PILOT forums. They expand leadership connections between units, departments, and divisions, and decrease fingerpointing.

Vertical

Vertical Forums in the same department or same office work well to strengthen communication among colleagues. These can be stabilizing for teams who have notoriously high-turnover.

Combination

Consider a Combination of Forums - a C suite horizontal forum, a District Manager virtual forum, a diagonal employee forum in the main office, or a vertical forum on the shop floor... whatever creates the best mix for your firm.

WHO RUNS THE MEETINGS?

Peer groups can be professionally facilitated by one of our facilitators for each meeting, or peer groups can be trained to moderate themselves over a series of initial meetings. Either way, our facilitators teach each group a specific, rigorous protocol, and they blend a bit of personal sharing into the sessions so people build enough trust to be candid about professional challenges. Meet the facilitators.

STRUCTURED MEETINGS

Each meeting agenda varies a bit, depending on the overall goal of the program, but they all follow a clear format with timed turns and a clear deep dive. Our moderator coach meets your moderators every month to plan good meetings and work through whatever is going on, and we follow up when something needs attention rather than waiting to be asked.

WHAT ARE THE RISKS?

  • Skeptical members stay skeptical. One unconvinced member can hold a group at polite updates for a year. We help you choose the first groups, and we invite rather than require, because a member who was assigned to a forum spends the first meeting waiting for some kind of gotcha.

  • People decide the program is a management listening exercise. Then members have performative conversations without genuine reflection. The protection is that content mostly belongs to the group. Leadership can suggest topics, but a moderator cannot be required to take one up. Reporting back is in aggregate: attendance and the category of each deep dive, with nothing identifying.

  • Confidentiality is never made clear. This is surprisingly rare. Since 2018, we've had 4 small instances of a breach and none of them changed a business outcome. In an internal forum, there are a few specific things that cannot stay confidential because they are too much of a risk for the individual or the organization. We state the boundary out loud at the start and put it in writing. 

WHAT CHANGES WHEN YOU HAVE A FORUM PROGRAM?

  • People are easier to work with. The outcomes of a forum program depend a bit on the kind of program you choose, but you can expect forum members to become more self-aware, more open to feedback and new ideas, and to have better relationships across the organization. 

  • Communication is way better. While you will not hear what was discussed specifically, you will notice behavior changes. Conversations start happening between people who used to route everything through you. Problems arrive earlier and in better shape. Disagreement shows up professionally, in the meeting itself, rather than in sidebar conversations or worse, in the urgency (or lack of urgency) of execution.

  • Retention. You will also notice a change in retention. At our pilot client, a healthcare consultancy, 100 people were in forum across two years. Two left the company, and one left their forum. That is a single client rather than a controlled study, and not a provable relationship between forum and your balance sheet. Check out the video about the Vynamic experience below

Forum at Vynamic

Vynamic launched one employee forum in 2019. Over the past few years, they have successfully launched over a dozen active forums. Recently, they even reshuffled half of their forums. Don't take our word for it; watch the testimonials of their forum participants and executives.

WHEN IS FORUM THE WRONG ANSWER?

Forum does not magically cure operational woes. If your org is struggling with senior compensation being below market, with everyone leaving from under the same manager, or with a team that cannot execute because priorities conflict and nobody holds the authority a decision needs, those problems require an operational lift. Forums can help with the change management and communication of that lift, so if your teams are in the process of making big changes, a forum program can make it smoother.

What forum can do is to bring operational woes to light without an argument. Members raise the thing they have been working around, in a room where nobody has to win and nothing has to be decided, and they usually find that someone else has been working around it too. The problem reaches you named and in better shape, rather than as a fight about who is responsible for it.

Forum is also not the answer to a problem that has to be fixed by Friday. Each meeting has an immediate effect on the people in it, and they will tell you so. The organization around them moves slower, and you should expect six to twelve months before anything shows up in your metrics. If you need a number to move this quarter, a forum program is the wrong instrument for that quarter.

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