2021 By the Numbers
One of The Making-Box’s strategic goals for 2022 is: make an impact and show it. So this January, we crunched a lot of numbers in an effort to better understand the story of 2021 for us and our clients.
We amassed data from every training and team-building project we lead last year, and put together all participant polling responses (measured before and after sessions). We learned a lot about ourselves and our clients in the process and we thought it would be useful share.
Note: We aren’t professional data engineers (not yet anyway) so there are likely some gaps in our process but we tried our best put together an honest look.
2478 participants 🙋🏽
Two-thousand four-hundred and seventy-eight participants in 2021. That’s the entire population of Montreal … in the year 1698. Through Zoom, Meets, Teams, Webex and a few IRL sessions, we worked with a lot of people and a few creatures too, including one baby chicken (see below). 92% of these people said they would like to work with us again. Unfortunately, the chicken did not complete the poll.
And where did these people and critters come from?
63 teamS FROM 42 organizations 👨🏽💻
This year we partnered with teams at Shopify, Google, RBC, University of Calgary and exactly 38 other organizations. We put together four in depth case studies here.
What sectors resourced us most frequently? If our clients were a medium pizza with 8 slices:
4 slices came from education (universities, colleges, teachers).
1 slice came from technology and e-commerce
1 slice came from food and retail services
1 slice came from professional services (banking, insurance, engineering).
1 slice came from a few other industries like: government, medical, and non-profit
97% of participants reported having fun 😊
While “having fun” is rarely our clients’ most important goal, this year many expressed hope that working with The Making-Box would leave their team feeling lighter amongst other development outcomes. We feel that “fun” is good measure of learner engagement and know that humour makes things sticky.
At the beginning and end of sessions, we also asked these questions:
How connected to the team do you feel right now? (1 = least, 5 = most)
Participants' feelings of connection increased an average 18% from beginning to the end. There was 61% increase in feelings of connection for multi-session programs. However the later, often involved bringing people together who had never met.How are you feeling right now? (1 = worst, 5 = best)
Participants mood increased by an average of 13% from beginning of sessions to the end.
4.47 ⭐ PARTCIPANT SATISFACTION RATING
For your reference, Canada’s Wonderland has a 4.5 ⭐ rating on Google. We feel 4.47 is pretty good considering nearly all of 2021 training and team-building sessions were online.
240 hours OF facilitation ⌚️
That’s ten straight days of facilitating with no breaks or sleep. In that time we could have completed J-Lo’s juice cleanse! While this number might seem low for an entire year, we feel this speaks to how effective we can be in making an impact on teams while not overly straining their time resources.
15 “Give Ones” 🎁
How does The Making-Box reach people who don’t have funding for our programs? The Give One. Every team who books with us gets the opportunity to gift a session to another organization in need. No extra costs. It’s baked into our model.
This year we completed 15 “Give Ones” with organizations like Wildlife Canada, The Centre for Sexuality and a group of elementary school psychologists in Georgia, USA. We also discovered ways to make the Give One process more effective, so next year clients will have smoother “gifting” and “getting” experience.
MEASURING IMPACT in 2022 📈
It’s clear to us that our programs have made adaptability approachable, energizing and bonding. This is important because often just hearing the word “resilience” in a pandemic-world can make people roll their eyes.
Looking ahead, we aim to level-up our data-informed approach by using Adaptability Quotient (AQ) Assessments. AQ measures the abilities, characteristics, and environmental factors that impact the successful behaviours and actions of people and organizations to effectively respond to uncertainty, new information, or changed circumstances.
We are honoured to be one of the first handful of Canadians to be Certified AQ Practitioners with AQai. AQ assessments have already been used at forward-thinking companies like IBM, Microsoft, and GSK, to develop and improve their adaptability and develop future-of-work strategies. Using this holistic measure will allow our clients to benchmark and accurately diagnose how to improve their ability to keep bouncing forward.