Before commissioning another workplace workshop, ask these five questions to make sure you’re solving the right organisational problem.
By Ify Bamigboye, BACP Integrative Psychotherapist & Certified Executive Coach
Something isn’t working.
Engagement has fallen. Managers are struggling. Employees are under pressure. Conflict is appearing. A team isn’t performing as expected.
Someone suggests: “Let’s run a workshop.”
Perhaps you should.
Workshops can create shared language, develop capability, surface conversations and give teams space to think differently. We deliver them ourselves.
But there is an important distinction: a workshop is an intervention. It isn’t a diagnosis.
Before deciding what employees need, ask five questions.
Start with evidence rather than labels. Compare “The team is disengaged” with: meeting participation has reduced; survey scores have fallen; delivery dates are slipping; people are leaving; managers report increased conflict.
The first is an interpretation. The others are observations. Words such as disengaged, resistant, unmotivated and difficult can sometimes lead organisations towards a solution before they have established the problem.
Ask: what exactly are we seeing?
Patterns tell us something. Is the issue organisation-wide? Within one division? One team? One level of seniority? One programme? Employees affected by a particular change? People reporting through a specific structure?
If twelve teams are performing well and one is struggling, an organisation-wide intervention probably isn’t the first place to look. The pattern helps narrow the investigation.
What changed? What are employees experiencing? What are managers experiencing? Where does work become harder than it needs to be? What pressures exist? How clear are roles? How are priorities managed? What happens when people raise concerns? How much change is the team absorbing? Does the team have the resources required to meet its demands?
This is where organisational psychology becomes useful. Not to diagnose employees. But to understand behaviour in context.
Many organisations accumulate interventions: leadership programmes, wellbeing webinars, engagement initiatives, coaching, away days, resilience programmes, new values and listening exercises.
But activity isn’t the same as impact. Ask: what did we expect to change? Did it? How do we know? What was different three months later? What wasn’t? Did behaviour change? Did management practice change?
Did the organisational conditions surrounding the problem change?
Without those questions, organisations can find themselves repeatedly buying different versions of the same intervention.
Ask this before delivery, not afterwards. What should be different? Better quality conversations? Earlier escalation of problems? Improved employee voice? Managers recognising pressure earlier? Greater role clarity? Fewer recurring conflicts? More effective decision-making? Improved delivery?
And how will you know?
Not every outcome needs a sophisticated measurement framework. But if nobody can describe what success would look like before an intervention begins, determining whether it worked becomes extremely difficult.
There is a subtle but important difference. Activity asks: “What can we deliver?” Intervention asks: “What needs to change?”
That distinction changes the consulting conversation. After assessment, the answer may genuinely be a workshop. It may instead involve leadership behaviours, team dynamics, role clarity, management capability, change, work design, employee voice or several interacting factors.
This is why MindPath uses a simple sequence: Assess → Understand → Intervene → Measure.
Organisations don’t need activity for activity’s sake. They need interventions connected to a clearly understood challenge.
So before asking “What programme should we run?”, start with: “What is actually happening here?”
The answer might save you from solving the wrong problem.
MindPath Perspective
Good interventions don’t start with content. They start with understanding.
Diagnose before you intervene.
Further Reading & Research
