Serious play

I could begin this blog by saying: ‘Here at Eureka we take training our staff very seriously’, because we do. But ‘serious’ suggests lectures, assessments, boredom and other things that are, well, serious! This was certainly not the case when it came to our ‘It’s Up To You’ training this month. Creative, spontaneous and hilarious are more like it.

Creative staff training helps inspire our Enablers when delivering programmes.

We were training our staff for something called the ‘It’s Up To You’ Hour. The idea was trialled last year and gave our Enablers a whole hour during the day in which they could do whatever they liked; tell a story, run a juggling workshop, take musical instruments into the galleries or other things of that nature. We found that our staff had many hidden talents which emerged through this initiative and the ‘Its Up To You Hour’ generated some of the best customer feedback we received in years. So we decided to re-launch the idea this year, timed with the hiring of a whole new batch of Enablers.

For the training we collected a vast number of resources; costumes, storybooks, props, and other diverse items. We then put the Enablers into groups and gave them the freedom to devise a full days worth of events using what we had in the room or anything they could find from the museum.

Complete freedom, however, can be intimidating, so we gave each group a simple scenario detailing how many visitors were in the museum and what the weather was like on the day they were planning for. This helped to inspire some of the events and made the enablers think about whether a particular event is suitable for varying visitor numbers.

‘We all need empty hours in our lives or we will have no time to create or dream’

The quote from child psychiatrist and author Robert Coles sums up or philosophy when executing the session. Creating a stimulating environment where the staff felt free to do what they wanted worked far better than having a structured training schedule as it gave them room to ‘Create and Dream’, though our hours were far from empty.

There was no shortage of ideas; staff devised a range of different activities, from manic games involving water balloons to quiet and calm origami folding. In this setting the Enablers were empowered to show off their many talents as musicians, magicians or historians.

Fun was had by all and this fun atmosphere will be directly passed onto our visitors who can expect varied spontaneous events and activities in our galleries in the future (particularly on weekends and quiet afternoons)!

So as we see training is a very important part of being an Enabler at Eureka, but I still wouldn’t say that ‘At Eureka we take training our staff very seriously’; I would rather say that ‘At Eureka we take training our staff very playfully’.

Ben Healey is a Team Leader at Eureka! The National Children's Museum