2.3.2 Practical Activity: Brainstorming Session

Objective: This brainstorming task aims at finding an innovative approach to the way your agri-food business treats its co-workers, customers, partners, and stakeholders. It will also help to spot the potential problems and challenges which occurred.

Instructions:

1. Arrange a meeting with your management team, co-workers, and if possible, partners. Make sure that all of you bear in mind the strategies for improving business relationships while discussing each point.
2. Discuss together the values of each party to be reassured that you understand them, and don’t forget about the customers. Try to establish some shared goals.
3. Try to come up with some useful strategies for risk management. You can discuss the existing procedures or/and analyse the instances of other agri-food companies.
4. Develop a plan of systematic training programs to integrate and collaborate with your colleagues, and partners to make sure you have the same or similar views, practices. During these sessions you could also discuss and asses the health of your business relationships, and ways of improvement.
5. Try to develop a plan for improving and maintaining long-lasting relationships with your customers. You can make use of some special offers or a loyalty plan with such deals for regular customers, newsletter, assessing surveys, etc.
6. Write everything down, in order to remember it and to have the chance to implement everything you have discussed. Propose some deadlines and you can already assign the tasks for the people responsible for the ongoing changes but remember about all the strategies, methods and procedures of communication and negotiation which were earlier discussed.

Such a brainstorming session enables you and your team not only to practice strengthening the professional relationships and teamwork, but also to come up with a few applicable ideas, which you can use later on.