Case Studies and Templates

Fostering an Insight Environment Within the DMO

In principle, every DMO today should represent the number one authority for tourism on the destination. Whether it is the public tourism authority funded by the Government or a private organisation that promotes tourism, it should be the institution that holds all the up-to-date information about visitors and tourism in the destination. DMOs should carry out and publish research on key tourism industry facts and figures and should therefore be structured as a knowledge-based organisation.

Many DMOs nowadays function more as marketing agencies for the promotion of the destination than representatives of the destination’s tourism. But this is slowly shifting towards the categorisation of DMOs as destination marketing & management organisations, who not only promote tourism but also involve the citizens in trying to understand their needs and propose solutions that are able to foster tourism without compromising the environment and citizens’ wellbeing, as well as making sure that tourism is a catalyst for inclusion, occupancy and long-term growth. In this regard, it is very important to foster knowledge within the organisation, because knowledge about the tourism industry, technology, trends and forecasts are as important as promoting the destination itself.

Knowledge should be at the heart of every DMO. Figuring out the role of your DMO might be complex, but we believe that it is first and foremost important to create an internal environment of communication and knowledge exchange.

This can be achieved in three different ways that need to answer three questions at the basis of knowledge exchange:

• Where are we now?
  
• What do we know?
• How do we do it?

When you are able to answer these questions through the involvement and inclusion of all your team members you have achieved a good level of knowledge management in your DMO. Let’s dive into these three areas to understand them better.

DMO Vision, Performance and Goal Sharing

Openly sharing your organisational values, vision, goals and KPIs and being transparent about where your destination is at the moment and what needs to be done is critical for the alignment of every member of the team.

This is fundamental in every organisation, as every person is working towards the established goals and needs to fully comprehend where the company is headed. In Chapter 1. The Holistic View we stressed on how important it is to share a company’s vision and values and to become a Glass Box Brand, a concept following the consideration that the internet has changed everything, transparency being one of the biggest game changers for brands, and that we can no longer make up values which don't truly represent us as a transparent company. This works of course for DMOs, so it’s very important that the values, organisational culture, vision and goals are shared internally by everyone.

As we later saw in Chapter 8. Performance and Measurement, everyone in the DMO needs to measure results and performance of the activities they carry out in the organisation and they need to share this data as it is fundamental in order to adjust the strategies connected to the long-term objectives.

Sharing results internally and reporting about success - or failure - is something that should be part of the corporate culture of your organisation. Reporting standards and internal communication platforms are much-needed tools to ensure nobody works in a silo and results and intelligence are shared internally. But the truth of the matter is that the majority of DMOs are not sharing their experiences and expertise gathered from working on campaigns, platforms or other activities with the rest of their internal teams. Every organisation has a different structure in terms of departments, roles and duties and the sharing of results and KPIs happens depending on this structure. Technology and the digital landscape in general can ease the process of knowledge sharing between departments.

For this reason, it is fundamental that DMOs embrace digital transformation at its very essence. As the digital landscape is becoming more complex and destinations need to become more digitally focused and savvy in targeting consumers, DMOs need to structure their organisation for a total and complete digital transformation. This means a shift in organisational structures and the position of digital skills and expertise within the organisation, both focused on the overall internal culture and mindset down to the tools and techniques when it comes to collaborative working through to the use of data in decision making and defining future solutions.

Structuring for Digital Transformation

Starting the process of re-thinking the organisational structure in your destination, it is important to see where digital skills and expertise is strongest in the organisation. Most organisation's location of digital capabilities will fall into the following five organisational structures:

• Centralised: Digital is centralised and an important pillar within the organisation.
• Hub & Spoke: Digital expertise is widely spread throughout the organisation.
• Dispersed: Digital skills are spread quite thinly across the organisation.
• Multiple Hub & Spoke: Digital expertise is widely spread through multiple departments in the organisation.
• Fully integrated: Digital skills are fully integrated throughout the organisation's structure.

These five models we described also work with regards to knowledge management. It is in fact important to identify if the knowledge - intended in the broader sense as creation of research, carrying out analysis, market studies etc. - is managed in a centralised way, in which there is one research department supplying the information to the others, or if each department or, even better, individual is given the right tools to create knowledge according to their needs. Depending on the current structure, DMOs might want to, or have to, take steps in adapting the structure to be fit for the future. It is necessary to identify which organisational structures work best for the DMO and consider how to adapt the structure to meet the need of knowledge creation and exchange within the internal environment.

Research and Specific Knowledge Sharing

Every department in the DMO has a specific role and expertise. As we just mentioned, depending on the type of organisational structure, knowledge as well as digital skills can be centralised or distributed across different departments and functions. Bigger companies usually have a centralised approach to research and knowledge sharing, either delegating these duties to a Research Department or to a Learning & Development (L&D) department, which takes care of learning and training programmes for the employees.

Whether your DMO is a small or big organisation, you should always be able to answer the question “What do we know?”. Managers should create an environment that stimulates research and development, not only to meet the company’s objectives but also to foster curiosity and inspiration from everyone in the team.

From a study carried out on a specific DMO case regarding the level of interest and propensity to learn about climate change and its effects on tourism, it emerged that knowledge sources vary across the different DMO departments and it mostly happens in an ad hoc and informal exchange. Even though the internal environment is open to share knowledge, the study shows that when the team is small and put under constant working pressure and there is no formal action taken from the management to encourage knowledge exchange, there are too few occasions to share knowledge within the team.

Organisational learning, the act of learning and developing one’s knowledge in the corporate environment, was described by Brown and Duguid in 1991 as “the bridge between working and innovating” . This is still very much applicable thirty years on. Therefore learning is necessary to innovate 3processes and outcomes and it starts from an individual’s training and self-improvement.There are three important facts that a manager should consider regarding knowledge:

• Understanding how to create the ideal environment for organisational learning;
• Being aware of what, where and how something was learned;
• Ensuring that the learning taking place is useful to the organisation.

Therefore knowledge management should be taken care of from a managerial level and leadership is key to instil this culture in an organisation. The study of K. Bandari (2014) highlighted that adaptive learning is also key in times of change. Organisations must learn and enhance their knowledge capabilities in order to gain a competitive advantage. Studies further showed that learning is a change enhancer that can improve the company's performance when and if there is an organisational culture and a leadership behaviour that encourages learning, training and adaptability, confirming that organisational learning is dependent on the management level of a company.

Learning and development has evolved in time. While in the past companies usually offered one-time training programmes, nowadays companies make use of continuous L&D programmes as a competitive advantage for recruitment, up-skilling and retention. A study carried out by Ceridian showed that a great 4 majority of interviewed employees (86%) feel as ‘extremely important’ the provision of learning opportunities from employers, so the question is not whether you need a learning and development strategy but which strategy is the best for your organisation. Training your team members is necessary if you want to survive in an industry that is changing and highly disruptive, and tourism is changing and evolving with consumers, with the changing of technology and human needs.

Another study from Econsultancy showed that organisations investing in people and digital skills fall in the optimum category of performance, outperforming competitors in their industry. The study showed that face- to-face training ranked first among the preferred types of learning, followed by self-organised research and short training sessions like half-day seminars/workshops.

life balance and having a range of flexible working options (60%). This means that employees nowadays feel the need to learn and develop encouraged by their employers but as much as they look for work flexibility they seek learning opportunities anywhere, anytime and through any device. Therefore digital solutions are needed and manifest in mobile-first content for on-the-go learning that can be taken by employees even during their free time. Among the trendiest topics for development nowadays we find data science, a sphere that is increasingly growing in companies to train employees to make better use of data for different purposes, from consumer research to performance evaluation.

What is clear from these studies is that the role of L&D within organisations is to foster and manage the development of people in view of supporting the company’s business priorities. This happens in different areas according to McKinsey , among which, attracting and retaining talent, motivating and engaging employees and creating a value-based culture that will develop people's capabilities in the short and long-term.

Deloitte highlighted that Millennials and Gen Z, which in the 2020 decade are going to account for 58% of the global workforce, have a different mentality from the past generations with regards to learning and development, as they no longer find it an optional add-on to their careers but a necessary part of their working lives, and they are inclined to change their job if employers will fail to provide it.

This is why, to prevent the loss of talent, organisations nowadays are promoting a new mindset and a corporate culture of learning and knowledge sharing, placing the employees at the centre of a new architecture and vision that foresees learning as a continuous process and a company-wide responsibility that has to be encouraged from the top management, HR and L&D departments, if present, but has to become the norm for every member of the team.

Coming back to DMOs, all the shared information above should be taken into consideration with regards to organisational learning and knowledge exchange. Tourism is among the ever-changing and technology-led industries that need innovation and continuous evolution. And if the role of the DMO is to be the number one authority for the creation and diffusion of knowledge about tourism, it is also true that it all starts from the internal environment and that knowledge sharing and exchange should be continuous. But another relevant question in this regard is: how do we share knowledge internally?

Tips and Tricks on Internal Knowledge Sharing

As previously highlighted, in the DMO environment it is more common to have an informal and non- structured knowledge exchange process in which team members need to find the right time to share their knowledge to make it happen, especially in smaller teams. The most common mistake in this regard would be to learn something potentially useful for the whole team but keeping it for yourself as an individual. We also learned that the trend with younger generations is that learning happens in a flexible way, at different times and across different channels, therefore younger generations prefer a type of individual learning through digital, which sometimes hinders the sharing element of learning.

For this reason the occasions for knowledge exchange should be created by the management, scheduled and defined in a clear process that identifies the right moments for knowledge sharing, according to the general company’s workflow but also sometimes regardless of it, because knowledge sharing is fundamental and it has to happen even when other activities need to be prioritised.

There are many different ways to stimulate knowledge-sharing within your team.

1. Team screenings: you could plan a team screening for either a documentary or an e-learning course of any kind, to watch and learn all together. The source can be an accredited institution as well as a simple YouTube video from an expert. It is very simple and time effective yet it fosters knowledge sharing. Especially in this, the DTTT Launchpad represents the best source for team screenings. With more than 200 Case Studies and Talks from the best DMOs worldwide, covering many different topics ranging from branding and content, to experience creation to website development and artificial intelligence, etc. you already have the access to a library of more than 100 hours of videos that are entirely DMO-focused.

2. Lunch learning sessions: organising a lunch learning session could be beneficial because you can gather the whole team and provide lunch for them while at the same time you carry out a training session on a specific topic for them. It is a nice occasion to share knowledge and gather the team. Nonetheless, you should remember that lunch breaks are very important for your employees/colleagues who need to take a break from work, so it would be good to let them compensate their time in exchange.

3. Training days: as we mentioned above, training face-to-face is still regarded as the most preferred option for learning, therefore your team should attend fixed yearly or monthly training days on a wide array of topics that can boost their performance.

4. Knowledge champions: another way to foster knowledge exchange is to appoint each one of your team members as a knowledge champion in a specific area, a sort of guru in a specific topic and the go- to person for any issue related to that area of work. Examples could be the Spreadsheet Champion, a person who is particularly talented with numbers and formulas, or the Technology Champion, a person who is always informed about state-of-the-art technology and can help other team members take decisions on a tech investment for the office. Knowledge champions could also be the leaders of quick training sessions on the specific area they master, maybe on a rotation basis that allows each champion to teach interesting lectures to others.

5. Team project competitions: think about a company challenge and form teams of people from different departments; launch the challenge and ask these teams to create a project to solve the challenge; establish a prize for the best project - like an incentive activity - and give a deadline to solve the challenge. You will be amazed by the collaboration efforts that will emerge from this and at the end of the competition there will be a great knowledge exchange since every team member will use their skills and knowledge to solve the challenge in a different way. This is not only an occasion for knowledge sharing but also an enriching experience for the whole team.

Especially for NTOs with offices abroad, don’t forget that knowledge exchange should not only be organised across departments but also across the abroad market offices and for any external collaborators involved in the DMO’s projects. This can happen via dedicated Skype sessions or through any of the many video conference providers available on the market.

Creative Thinking

One of the most common questions in any organisation when embarking on a new project or area of activity, or even just when trying to solve a challenge or problem is “How do we do it?”. This is where knowledge intervenes usually providing the answers based on factual information and research. But not all the existing knowledge base in this world is helpful when there is a new scenario to work on. In this case, creative thinking is needed and the whole team should come together in a common collaborative effort to think creatively and logically about the issue or the challenge faced by the organisation.

This can be achieved through Design Thinking and Agile Working. As we already mentioned in Chapter 10. Technology and Disruption and as we are going to focus more in-depth in Chapter 12. Exploration and Innovation, Design Thinking is at the heart of the #DTTT and we strongly encourage the use of the principles and tools of design to stimulate more innovative and creative thinking to solve common and uncommon challenges through mind stimulation and absurd ideation. Design Thinking helps team members take on complex situations and turn them into compelling, enjoyable and creative tasks that stimulate the brain and provide an environment of exploration and ideation without precedents. We will dive more in detail into Design Thinking in chapter 12.

Agile Working

When talking about knowledge-sharing we should also mention that people who work more agile are more facilitated and incline to learn. If you are interested to learn how you can introduce agile methods and processes in your organisation, then our following tips might be a good starting point. Everyone now wants to work in a more agile way and it is quickly becoming a buzzword that might sound like it is easier said than done. Many startups and big organisations are trying to break silos within the organisation and teams, as the reality is that teams don't talk to each other as often as they should, making it more difficult to support each other. With anything, agile methods are not just a one-off thing that fixes a problem but a process that needs to be repeated regularly so it becomes a habit and core to everyone's way of working.

Stand up Meetings

In case you are new to agile methods, stand-up or scrum meetings can be a good introduction to daily or weekly updates on work. While you might still have many meetings, they are probably long, cover a lot of topics and take up a lot of your time, making it difficult to actually get things done. To avoid this but still have a good and open conversation between teams and team members, stand up meetings are much shorter and designed to be efficient.

To organise a stand up meeting, make sure it is done in the morning and send out a weekly calendar invite to remind everyone to join. The meeting is short and to make sure it remains short, everyone stands during the entire meeting. If a team of 5-10 people organises a stand up meeting, it will be around 10-15 minutes long, asking everyone to give a short update. Focus on the following structure:

• What did you achieve yesterday?
• What do you plan to do today?
• Are there are any issues standing in your way?

If you need to discuss something with a team member, it is best to do so as part of a sidebar meeting rather than during the short stand up meeting. While this might look like a waste of time, hopefully not, it is so important to make sure everyone is in the loop of what other team members are doing. This enables you as a team to flag up if things are not going according to plan or if there are roadblocks that need to be tackled sooner rather than later. Use the last minute of the meeting to wrap up and cover anything else that might come up.

5 Steps to Make Your Stand up Meeting is a Success

Schedule regular meetings and mark them in the team calendar.

Use a countdown and set it for 10-15 minutes max.

Kick off your meeting at the same time and place each time - everyone needs to stand for the duration of the meeting.

Focus on what everyone worked on yesterday / today and any issues.

Wrap up and organise follow-up smaller meetings if needed.

Planning Tasks Working with Swim Lanes

The goal of using swim lanes is to show how a task or project is worked on visually, showing different decisions and how different departments collaborate. This can be really helpful to get an overview of what needs to be done, who is responsible and how it can be best organised. Each swim lane can be a different department or team member, depending on your needs and the complexity of the project. To support you in organising a project, we have designed a template to help you visually map out tasks or projects.

While this seems a bit unusual at first, using swim lanes is a really efficient way to map out cross-functional processes in a visual and structured way. The example below shows our swim lane template filled in on the basis of a task to produce specific content for a website, outlining the status of individual content pieces. Each swim lane represents a different component of the task which can be looked at individually or in the context of the other swim lanes.

Continue to the next lesson