Roby’s first ever Challenge Week was a success! Here are a couple of key highlights and lessons learned from a very busy week.

From contactless visitor entry systems to voice-activated lighting, touchless technology will touch every aspect of our daily lives. So it’s important to choose workplace solutions that meet immediate safety requirements and provide long term utility to tenants and building owners.

What is Challenge Week?

We wanted to use Challenge Week as a structural initiative to promote employee development and organizational problem-solving.

Everyone at Roby was given the opportunity to step away from their day-to-day tasks for one week, the only requirement being that you had to be engaged in something completely new. This could be learning a new skill, an unfamiliar programming language, or taking on a leadership role.

What did we want to achieve?

Going into our first challenge week, we knew it was critical to focus our goals around the culture and attitude towards learning that we want to grow within our organization. With this in mind, we centered our efforts on three main criteria:

• Create space for our team to engage in new skills and allow everyone time to collaborate, reflect, solve problems outside of their day-to-day tasks
• Better understand the importance of a “growth mindset” and the role innovative, transformative thinking plays
• Treat learning like a business project: clearly understand the problem, identify the desired outcomes, deploy strategically, and measure results aggressively

By quantifying these competencies and creating meaningful objectives around them, we were able to measure results and provide useful feedback to everyone at the end of the week!

Results:

Lead by designated project manager KJ Tien, head UI/UX designer at Roby, everyone was able to achieve or surpass the lofty goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the week.

The engineering team joined forces to build an internal portal for more efficient knowledge sharing across departments. Not only did they collaborate on a vision for how and what the portal would be, but they also built it using a new wireframing tool, language, and testing procedure.

Also exploring unfamiliar territory were our marketing and customer success teams. By carrying out exercises in HTML, CSS, JS, and SQL they were able to learn new, innovative ways to support customers and streamline business operations.

Even more encouraging was the feedback received from an anonymous exit survey conducted at the end of the week, with all participants rating the overall experience 5 out of 5 and citing ​​”Increased confidence in learning & development efforts” and “Learning a new, useful skill” as their most valuable takeaways.

Congratulations to the entire Roby team for embodying the spirit of innovation in everything that you do! This will undoubtedly be the first of many Challenge Weeks to come at Roby.