Work Forward Summit 2020 Recap
What Happened?
On October 20 – 23, in the midst of a global pandemic that is disrupting the world of work, Work Forward remotely hosted its second summit to bring together thought leaders from across the globe to discuss, collaborate, and work together to imagine how we can make work better. There is a saying that the success of a business is inseparable from the success of its people. The last few months have demonstrated just how true and important that statement is.
For this summit, our work centered around four goals designed to help nurture the continued development of the Work Forward community of advocates and champions, produce tools and resources to support individuals and organizations in evolving their ways of working. Here are the fours goals from the summit:
- Advance awareness, concepts, ideas, and work of Work Forward
- Create new advocates and champions
- Bring together people with diverse experiences to cross-pollinate Work Forward ideas
- Build working groups to take on key initiatives to further Work Forward
In pursuit of these four goals, we constructed four working groups that formed the structure for the summit. Summit attendees had their choice of the following working groups:
Success Stories — Signs of Working Forward: Narrative examples of application and success stories of Work Forward concepts.
Assessments — Are we ready to Work Forward?: Means to test yourself or your company/team for Work Forward readiness and acceptance.
Resources & Tools — Work Forward Applied: Activities and resources for applying Work Forward now to my own work/my company’s work.
Promotion & Socialization — Evangelize Work Forward: Messaging and amplifying the Work Forward message promotion.
Over the course of the 4-day summit, each group began with a set of goals in mind and worked together to construct concepts for how to advance the Work Forward movement in each of their respective areas. Following deep exploratory dives on days 2 & 3, groups came together on day 4 to share and discuss their findings from the summit and to present the concepts they had created. Some examples included a prototype assessment to gauge the Work Forward-readiness of organizations and individuals and a prototype for a Work Forward pod/vodcast designed to reach new audiences via social media.
What’s Next?
The 2020 Work Forward summit may have finished but the movement continues onward! Overwhelmingly the feedback from the summit was about the desire to meet again and dive even deeper into the progress made at the Summit. We completely agree and have decided to start by hosting workshops monthly on the third Thursday of each month.
Register nowIn the meantime, here are three things you can do now to get more involved.
- Join our Slack workspace to stay in the know. We use this platform to share new ideas, upcoming events, and discoveries of Work Forward principles being applied around the world.
- Follow us on social media. We have a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- And we’d so appreciate your use of the hashtag, #workforward – you can add it to your own posts about your experience at the Summit, or when amplifying articles or research that mirror the WF principles.
