Ten ideas for corporate workshops

Are you organising a corporate workshop and need ideas? This might help.

I’ve run workshops for companies of all sizes, from ten-person teams to big international businesses, and taught on executive programmes at Cranfield. Below are ten workshop ideas that work, each with who it suits and an activity you can use on the day. After that come the two questions that decide whether any workshop is worth the money: how to choose the right one, and how to make it stick.

What is a corporate workshop?

A working session where a team learns something together and puts it to use straight away. It might be called a workshop, a company workshop, an away day or a training day. What makes it a workshop rather than a lecture is that people do things: they practise, they argue, they build something they take back to work.

Done well, a workshop is good for the company and good for the people in it. They learn new skills, they get to know colleagues they rarely work with, and they leave with something to do on Monday.

The ten ideas at a glance

How do you choose the right workshop?

Start with what you want to be different afterwards. Pick the goal, and the right workshops follow.

Then ask three practical questions. Who needs to be in the room? How much time can they give it? And what will they do differently the following week? If you can’t answer the last one, the workshop isn’t ready yet. My guide to planning a corporate workshop goes through the rest.

1. Practical AI for your team

At the moment, this is the workshop I’m asked for most. Most teams have access to AI tools, a few people use them well, and the rest either don’t use them or use them badly. A practical AI workshop closes that gap.

The best ones skip the history of AI and the predictions, and spend the time on the team’s own work: writing proposals, researching customers, analysing data, drafting the emails nobody wants to write. Cover what AI is good at, where it goes wrong, and the company’s rules for using it safely.

Try this: ask everyone to bring a real task from their week, then do it with AI in the room and compare the results. I’ve written about why the best way to learn AI is to play.

2. Sales skills

Sales workshops help teams win more business and stay up to date with how customers buy. They cover the whole journey: finding and qualifying prospects, understanding what customers need, handling objections, and closing.

They’re also a good way to get knowledge moving round the company. Information doesn’t always flow freely from product teams to sales teams, and a workshop with both in the room can fix that in an afternoon.

Try this: run Objection Roulette. Spin the wheel, answer the customer’s objection, then survive the pushback. Or warm up with Rich’s Cup of Bad Ideas, where everyone has sixty seconds to sell a terrible product.

3. Key account management

Most companies get a large share of their revenue from a handful of customers, and they rarely manage those customers as well as they could. A key account management workshop teaches teams to plan for their most important customers: understand the customer’s world, map the people who make decisions, and build a plan that grows the account.

Try this: run a PESTLE analysis for one of your biggest customers rather than for yourself. It shows you their world through their eyes, often with threats and opportunities they haven’t spotted yet.

4. Value and pricing

Every sales team is under price pressure. A workshop on value helps people understand what their customers actually gain from working with them, put a number on it, and defend the price rather than discount it away.

Try this: play The Discount Machine. Two sliders show how much extra volume a discount needs to pay for itself, and it’s usually far more than anyone in the room guesses.

5. Strategy and planning

A strategy workshop helps a leadership team agree where the company is going and what to do first. It usually starts with a look at the outside world, moves on to the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and ends with goals.

Try this: end the day with a 3-12-6 plan: one goal for three years, one for twelve months and one for the next six weeks, each written as a SMART goal.

6. Communication skills

Good communication is essential in any workplace, and most people never get any training in it. A communication workshop covers active listening, giving and receiving feedback, handling conflict, and working with colleagues in other teams and countries. It’s also where customer service skills belong: listening properly, showing empathy, and finding out about problems early.

Games work well here. A few I’d consider:

• Two truths and a lie. Each person shares three statements about themselves, two true and one false, and the group guesses the lie. Good for introductions and for listening.
• Telephone. You played it at school under another name. Whisper a message round a circle and compare the final version with the original.
• Blind drawing. Sit back to back. One person describes a picture, the other draws it without seeing it. It shows how much detail clear instructions need.
• Role play. Practise real conversations: an unhappy customer, difficult feedback, a disagreement with a colleague. Keep it realistic rather than cheesy (think of how funny The Office was).
• One-word story. Go round the group, each person adding one word to a story. Everyone has to listen and build on what came before.

7. Presentation skills

Whether it’s a conference keynote or leading a team meeting, the ability to get ideas across makes a big difference to a career. A presentation workshop covers structure and storytelling, simple, clear slides, and delivery: voice, pace, nerves and body language.

Try this: ask everyone to give a two-minute talk with no slides, then again with three slides, and let the group decide which was better. My tips for giving a great presentation cover the rest.

8. Creativity and innovation

Lots of business problems need new ideas, and most teams are better at criticising ideas than at having them. A creativity workshop teaches structured ways to generate ideas, such as brainstorming, mind mapping and reverse brainstorming (how could we make this problem worse?), and ways to choose between them. Design thinking adds the discipline of starting from what customers need.

Try this: give small groups three random prompts and twenty minutes to invent a product or service that uses all three. I use a deck of cards for this in some workshops, and the odd combinations produce the best ideas.

9. Time, pressure and wellbeing

Busy teams can work harder and harder without getting further. A workshop on time and pressure covers prioritising, setting boundaries, managing workload, and recognising stress before it turns into something worse. I’d always rather a company removed the causes of undue stress, but where pressure can’t be avoided, knowing how to handle it helps.

Try this: ask everyone to list their tasks for the week, then sort them into urgent and important. Most people find that the important work keeps losing to the urgent.

10. Cybersecurity and safe AI use

Cyber attacks keep getting more sophisticated. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre expects AI to make phishing emails harder to spot, because they no longer carry the spelling and grammar mistakes that used to give them away (NCSC). Almost everyone in a company now needs the basics: strong passwords and multi-factor authentication, spotting phishing, and reporting quickly when something looks wrong. Add the rules for using AI tools safely, including what company and customer data must never be pasted into them.

Try this: show a set of real and fake emails and have teams vote on which are genuine. It’s quick, competitive, and people remember it.

How do you make a workshop stick?

This is where most workshops fail. People leave enthusiastic, go back to a full inbox, and within a few weeks most of what they learned has gone.

Hermann Ebbinghaus measured this in the 1880s, testing his own memory of lists of nonsense syllables over time. Memory drops fast at first and then levels off. Each time the material is reviewed and used again, the drop gets slower (Wikipedia). His results were replicated in 2015 (Murre and Dros).

So build the follow-up into the plan before the day:

• End with actions. Every person leaves with something specific to do, an owner and a deadline.
• Use it within a week. The first real use of a new skill matters more than anything said in the room.
• Review at six weeks. A short session to share what worked, what didn’t and what’s next.
• Make managers part of it. If the boss never asks about it, the team will assume it didn’t matter.

I’m a big believer that education without action is incomplete. A workshop is where the change starts.

What does a good half-day look like?

Less talking from the front than most people expect. Here’s the shape of a half-day I’d run.

Open with an icebreaker rather than the dreaded round of introductions. Explain why everyone is there and what will be different afterwards. Keep the teaching short, give the practice the longest slot, and always leave time at the end to plan what happens next.

Your corporate workshop

There’s a workshop for every kind of team and every kind of challenge. Whether you want to sell more, work better together, get ready for AI or simply plan the year, the same rule applies: decide what should be different afterwards, make the day practical, and follow it up.

Sources: Wikipedia, Forgetting curve; Murre, J. M. J. and Dros, J. (2015) Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve, PLOS ONE 10(7); National Cyber Security Centre (2024) The near-term impact of AI on the cyber threat.