Although many of us work at museums and heritage sites that have been around a lot longer than we have, sometimes we will come across the opportunity to create a visitor experience from scratch. This might be in the form of a new exhibition or offer within an existing site, or when opening a brand-new attraction for the first time.

Creating a visitor experience from the beginning is an amazing opportunity. It allows you to set the tone of your offer and the culture of your workforce. It allows you to get all the processes and procedures in place exactly as you like them, without having to battle with pre-existing ways of doing things.

However, setting up everything from the beginning is also a lot of work. And, because many Visitor Experience professionals have been in this position as well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel in every area. This first part of the book allows you to learn from best practice when it comes to creating your visitor experience, using case studies from organisations such as the Postal Museum and the Ashmolean to help inform your work.

But this part isn't just for those starting from scratch. Going back to basics is a great way to audit a visitor experience you are already managing. So, whether you are an experienced Visitor Experience Manager or brand-new to the sector, there will be something you will find useful in this section.

Visitor Experience is all about people. Therefore, the first three chapters of this book explore the most important factor in delivering amazing visitor experiences: getting your Visitor Experience team in place. Using case studies from Margate Caves and Verdant Works: Scotland's Jute Museum, we’ll explore how to recruit and induct staff and volunteers, using processes that build diverse and enthusiastic teams.

Then, we’ll start to look at the experiences, beginning with a detailed look at visitor journey mapping. This tool can help us ensure we are considering our new experience (or our current ones) from the visitor point of view.

Finally, we’ll take a look at setting up those nuts and bolts of the visitor experience: ticketing, capacities and queues, using a case study from the Stained-Glass Museum to show that great technological solutions don't have to break the bank.

In Part 3 of this book, we’ve talked a lot about developing the visitor experience. An unavoidable part of this development is organisational change, and taking your visitor offer or your visitor-facing teams from where they are now to where you want them to be. Change management is a huge topic, and one that many books have focused on in detail. But as change is such a crucial part of making visitor experiences better, I think it's important to talk about it here. In this chapter, you won't find an in-depth discussion of change management or an exhaustive list of change models. You will find, however, an overview of what change management is, and an exploration of how some of the most popular models and techniques can be utilised when managing change around the visitor experience.

What is change management?

‘Change’ in the Visitor Experience setting can mean many things, including:

• • opening a new exhibition or experience

• • closing a space temporarily or permanently

• • internal team restructures

• • changes in working conditions, such as hours, uniform or benefits

• • stopping a programme, such as tours, or starting a new one.

However, it can also include any type of change; big or small. The Association for Project Management (APM) defines change management as ‘a structured approach to moving an organisation from the current state to the desired future state’ (APM, 2017, 5). The reason the APM advocates a ‘structured approach’ to the bit in between the current state and the desired future state is that it's by far the most complex part. If you lead a Visitor Experience team, you might think that you should be able to drive change just by articulating it. Unfortunately, most of us know that is almost never the case. Or, you might think that your background of operating in the ever-changing, unpredictable world of Visitor Experience gives you all the skills you need to manage change without the help of a formal model.

In 2010, I attended my first Museums Association conference in Brighton. I was a new Visitor Experience Manager, keen to learn more, and I vividly remember my disappointment when I realised there was nothing on the conference agenda that spoke to my area of interest. Nothing about front-ofhouse staff, nothing about experience creation, nothing about the nuts and bolts of the visitor operation. Visitor Experience was seen as the way into a museum career, rather than a specialism in itself.

More than a decade later, I’m delighted that this viewpoint has changed. Today, the Museum Association has been part of creating a front-of-house charter of best practice, and Visitor Experience topics make regular appearances on conference agendas and in museum journals. For me, this is thrilling progress; an acknowledgement of how important the Visitor Experience is in ensuring museums really are for everyone. If any doubts do still exist about the value of this discipline, I see it as my job, and the job of my fellow specialists, to shine a light on what we do and keep it high on the agenda.

I wrote this book with the intention of sharing best practice and guidance in delivering fantastic visitor experiences. I was driven by the knowledge that Visitor Experience really is a specialism; it takes skill, knowledge and talent to pull it off.

So, to all my fellow Visitor Experience specialists: I hope you’ve been inspired by the case studies shared in this book to continue developing your own practice. I can't wait to see what you all do.

Now, have you thought about the toilets?

Museums and cultural organisations exist not just to preserve the past, but to have an impact on the future through inspiring change in their visitors. Exactly how to best define and demonstrate this impact has been a source of some debate in the museum community, but one concept that has emerged as central to impact is that of ‘emotion’.

In early museum studies, the idea of engaging with emotion was seen as a distraction from the fact-based, authoritative voice museums should have. Museums were considered to be objective and expert arbiters of facts, with no room to engage with a concept as vague and subjective as emotion (Smith and Campbell, 2015). However, more recent research into audience impact has highlighted the benefits of engaging with emotion, especially when dealing with some of the stories left out by the traditional museum approaches of the past. Developing programmes or exhibitions which deliberately deal with emotional content can help visitors experience greater impact, make deeper connections and ultimately, even create positive change.

There is little doubt that engaging in emotion work in museums has real benefits. However, when deliberately targeting visitor emotion, it is vitally important that we also consider possible negative effects on the visitor, and in turn, the impact this can have on our frontline teams.

The impact on Visitor Experience staff

As we have seen above, there are good reasons to design emotion into museum experiences. Used wisely, programming that targets audience emotion can have a greater impact on our visitors, enable them to make deeper connections and even inspire positive behaviour change. But in order to say we have used it wisely we have to consider the impact emotional programming has on the jobs of frontline staff.

We’ve probably all had museum and heritage experiences that have affected us deeply. Some examples would clearly be challenging and deeply troubling to come face to face with, like a charred child's lunchbox at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum, or nooses displayed at Kingston Lacy representing men hanged for homosexuality.

One aspect of museum programming or interpretation that Visitor Experience staff are often involved in delivering personally is the guided tour.

Like many aspects of museum practice, guided tours have gone through peaks and troughs of popularity over the years. We are all familiar with the classic pitfalls of the guided tour offer: the monologuing tour guide, the overreliance on facts and figures, and strict historic-house hosts who seem to rule their group with a rod of iron (Vagnone and Ryan, 2016). But there are far more examples where museum tour guiding is done really well: and in these instances, we find that tours can be a great way to provide a personalised, rich and dynamic experience to your visitors. In this chapter, we will look at the pros and cons of guided tours, and ways to develop a tour – and more importantly, develop tour guides – to keep your visitors engaged and coming back for more.

Pros and cons of guided tours

There are pros and cons to face-to-face tour guiding, summed up in Table 9.1, but actually all the research points to them as being a sure-fire way to increase visitor satisfaction. In fact, many studies show that not only do visitors have a more enjoyable experience if they take part in guided tours (Huang, Weiler and Assaker, 2014, 354), they are also more likely to visit again (Weiler and Black, 2015, 92).

Tours can also provide a sense of security for visitors. Rather than having to decide for themselves which are the important highlights of a museum, a curated tour takes the pressure off and leaves them in the hands of experts. There's also a social aspect to this security. Group activities provide opportunities to encounter the new and unexpected – which for many is a key motivator for experiencing culture – in the safety of the collective (Schmidt, 1979, 443).

On the other side of the coin, there can be perceived disadvantages to guided tours. First is the accusation that tours are didactic: people talk at you, not with you. As a tourist on a guided tour, it can be easy to spectate rather than participate (Schmidt, 1979, 444), and slip into a lethargy of disengagement where very little learning or enjoyment can be gained from the experience.

This is the chapter that I would probably refer to as the ‘bread and butter’ of operations. As much as we Visitor Experience professionals devote our time to making museum trips the absolute best they can be, it's inevitable that our roles can often be defined by what happens when something goes wrong. This is neatly summed up by the words at the start of this chapter, from the Twitter bio of a former colleague of mine, David Hingley. A great Duty Manager shift is when the building doesn't set on fire, when the tills don't go down, when a staff member isn't shouted at by an angry visitor.

In operations, though our successes are signalled more by silence than fireworks, we shouldn't underestimate the amount of work it takes to achieve relative calm. Like the swan gliding effortlessly across a pond, beneath the surface our legs are thrashing energetically through a never-ending slew of risk assessments, training modules and standard operating procedures (SOPs). To do this effectively, one needs a good understanding of the audience, a great relationship with frontline teams, an unhealthy attention to detail and most importantly, a deeply morbid imagination.

A Visitor Experience Manager might be asked to create a suite of operational procedures from scratch, but more often, procedures are already in place. They have built up over years of organisational memory, made up of incidents that have occurred and questions people have asked. They are built on good solid experience but, nevertheless, it's important to review these procedures every so often (at least once a year) to make sure they are still fit for purpose. Whether you are creating operational procedures for a brandnew offer, or just conducting a regular health check of your existing ones, hopefully this chapter will give you some practical tips around best practice, training and structure.

Before I talk about specific operational incidents, it's worth spending some time on the context in which operational management occurs.

In the first part of this book, we spoke about how to deliver a great induction for new staff. However, engagement and development of your team should not be something that only happens in their first week. It's important to keep staff engaged throughout their time at your organisation and especially if you are looking to evolve and improve the visitor experience.

The desire to keep training going throughout the employee journey is always up against the challenges of the museum environment. The main one is time, both in developing and delivering from a management point of view and often the sheer impossibility of getting frontline staff away from the floor long enough to be able to train them. Scarcity of time can also lead to lack of strategic planning, with training becoming sporadic or piecemeal as a result.

When thinking about what kind of training visitor-facing staff need, we are also grappling with the constant, ever-evolving conversation about what visitor engagement is, what the Visitor Experience role is expected to deliver and what skills need to be developed in order to meet our goals in this area.

Finally, as staff move from being new recruits to established employees, it can be hard to identify genuine and fruitful continuing development opportunities, especially when dealing with large, diverse teams, and therefore, a variety of learning styles and goals.

This chapter will touch on all of these challenges, and hopefully suggest some ways you can meet them.

Employee engagement

Before we talk about training and development, it's important to say that these are not the only tools of employee engagement. When something goes wrong in the Visitor Experience teams, its common to blame lack of training, but just as important as formal development is the culture of engagement in the organisation.

In my experience, most people who have a passion for this sector don't want to merely manage the status quo. We are constantly looking to evolve and develop the experiences we deliver, adapting and flexing to meet changing needs and trying new things to engage our visitors in different ways. Therefore, this final section of the book looks at the skills and tools we need to do exactly that.

As Visitor Experience professionals, we rarely work in silos. We have interdependencies with other departments, and must work with others to best serve the visitors. Therefore, if we want to develop and evolve our experiences, we must also become advocates for them. Chapter 11 explores different methods of doing this, with a case study from the Mary Rose Museum to show these methods in practice.

In order to develop our experiences, we must first have an accurate picture of the current reality, and a way of measuring our development as we progress. Chapter 12 therefore explores different methods for measuring the quality of the visitor experience, highlighting a blended approach from the Natural History Museum to show that there is no one-size-fits all solution when it comes to visitor evaluation.

‘Creating a Visitor Experience Strategy’, which is the title of Chapter 13, may sound as though it's only relevant to national museums who develop and deliver all sorts of big ‘strategies’ on a regular basis. However, a Visitor Experience Strategy can be as simple as making a quick but bold decision about what audience you serve and how you do it, as the case study from the community-focused London Museum of Water and Steam will show.

Continuing development and engagement of your Visitor Experience team is absolutely critical to the development of the visitor experience. Without a team that is consistently engaged and learning, you will struggle to keep the experiences you deliver fresh. Chapter 14 examines continuing employee engagement and training programmes, whilst Chapter 15 explores how a culture of innovation can be fostered within your team.

Finally, all of these approaches will mean change for your team and your organisation, so it seemed only fitting to finish with a chapter, Chapter 16, exploring change management strategies and how they fit within the Visitor Experience context.

In talking with colleagues in the Visitor Experience world, both in general and in researching this book, I have run into a common challenge: common enough to focus a chapter on it here. This section of the book is all about developing the visitor experience: setting new goals and taking your operation forward to achieve them. To do that, it's really important that within our organisations we act as effective advocates for the visitor experience, working alongside colleagues in other departments to deliver visitor-centred improvements.

And yet this isn't always as simple as it sounds. Through conversations with others and my own experience, I know that there can often be barriers to effective advocacy. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of these barriers and explore examples of best practice from across the sector to learn how to overcome them.

Barriers to effective advocacy

One of the most common barriers to visitor experience advocacy is the positioning of the responsible department within the organisation. The name given to what I would call the Visitor Experience team changes over time and across different organisations, as does where the department sits. I have seen it included as part of a wider Operations team, part of the Public Engagement team, part of the Learning team, part of the Marketing and Audience Development team, part of the Commercial team: the list is endless. You might think this doesn't matter: Visitor Experience teams have to work with everyone in the organisation to deliver the visitor offer, so what does it matter where they sit?

Actually, I’ve found that it really does make a difference. In small or big museums, having a senior champion of visitor experience, whether that's through management structure or through having a senior advocate at board level, will hugely impact how visitor-centric your organisation is, and how seriously the job of those in visitor-facing roles is taken. Job titles and organograms matter. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this example from someone I interviewed for this book (who I will keep anonymous for obvious reasons). This person told me the story of working in a large organisation where the operations team were called ‘custodians’, whilst other teams were known as the ‘professional’ staff. The professional staff even had a nickname for the staff on site: ‘donkeys’.

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to investigate one central component of workplace information literacy, namely information sharing at the workplace and its impact on work satisfaction.

Workplace information sharing has been defined as the activities of sharing day-to-day work-related information (Savolainen, 2017). In this chapter, we will consider information and knowledge sharing as synonyms, applying the term used in the literature we cite. Both the concepts of information and knowledge sharing essentially describe the activity of sharing (Pilerot, 2012; Savolainen, 2017).

In essence, white-collar work is about creating knowledge. Knowledge sharing among employees is, in turn, key for individual and organisational performance, innovation and efficiency (Ahmad and Karim, 2019). Ferguson and Lloyd (2007) argue that information literacy and knowledge management share many similarities in organisational contexts; both are applied to maximise the use of knowledge in organisations and foster knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is, therefore, a key component of information literacy (Leith and Yerbury, 2015).

In previous research, workplace information literacy has largely been investigated in the context of work performance and innovation (for example, Ahmad, Widén and Huvila, 2020). Less is known about the impact of workplace information literacy on socio-emotional aspects of work, such as work satisfaction. Worker wellbeing and work satisfaction are, however, just as important factors of working life as productivity. One key factor in work satisfaction is self-determination (Brunelle and Fortin, 2021). In this chapter, information sharing is investigated as a part of self-determination in the workplace, which in turn results in work satisfaction. This shows that aspects of workplace information literacy, such as information sharing, do not only influence work performance, but also psycho-social factors such as work satisfaction. In Chapter 2, Mård and Hallin refer to Lloyd's (2010) concept of information sharing as a key component of information literacy as a sociomaterial practice. In this chapter, information sharing is investigated as an individual practice related to work satisfaction. These chapters work in tandem, demonstrating that information sharing is part of the sociomaterial practice at work (see Chapter 2) and, at the same time, a factor influencing the individual employee's experiences and activity at work.

The starting point of this book has been a growing realisation of the impact of digitalisation and digital information on the transformation of the contemporary workplace. Today's workplace is very different from how a place of work has been conceptualised previously. Information and informational skills, competencies and capabilities have a similarly radically different role in how people work and how work and workplaces are organised. All this makes workplace information literacy a crucial condition for their successful digitalisation.

Underlining the impact of digital information and informational competencies might sound like stating the obvious, especially when the massive impact on information literacies established itself as a cliché more than a decade ago (Francke, Sundin and Limberg, 2011). However, it has become all the more apparent that information literacies are a fleeting target that evolve alongside digitalisation and its contexts. Among literacies, workplace information literacy (WIL) and workplace as a site of literacies has so far received comparatively less attention than other information literacies in education and library contexts. This is an issue that this book aimed to address by introducing and discussing perspectives and approaches to how information literacy can function as a key concept in not only understanding but also making a difference in the workplaces of today and tomorrow.

In the preceding chapters, we have made excursions to different aspects of WIL and its role in the contemporary and future workplace. Some of these explorations have pointed to theoretical and conceptual issues, methodological considerations on how to investigate WIL, processual and transitional perspectives on what it takes to be information literate in different contexts, and what the outcomes and implications are in the workplace.

From a conceptual and theoretical perspective, the extensive literature review conducted by Teixeira and Karim (Chapter 1) points to the diversity of perspectives on the information literacy concept. The diversity can be seen both as an opportunity and a complication. It is a strength as long as it helps to address different aspects of being (information) literate in increasingly digitalising (information) work. However, it can become a burden if WIL research and practice loses sight of the essence of the concept: skills, competencies and mastery of the complex informational landscape of the contemporary workplaces. A prominent risk is also if the various WILs are too violently torn apart from each other by overemphasising their differences.

Introduction

The emergence of digitalisation has transformed the ways entrepreneurs seek and acquire information from available digital information sources. The vast amount of digital information sources offers unprecedented opportunities to entrepreneurs and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to enhance their business performance. However, acknowledging the benefits that digital information sources provide, especially in terms of quality and accessibility, entrepreneurs should develop their literacy skills, such as information literacy (IL hereinafter). In an information-based society, IL is defined as the necessary skills and competencies to find, handle and use information and individuals are required to acquire such skills. Some authors argue that IL is the most important literacy in our contemporary society as it enables us to achieve both personal and professional goals, as well as supporting economic development (Virkus, 2011). Besides IL, social norms, ‘the influence of peers’ (Brännback et al., 2018) and types of tasks may also affect entrepreneurs’ perception of digital information sources and, in turn, their digital information sources selection (Nikou et al., 2020). Moreover, the continuous expansion of digitalisation has been associated with a substantial reduction of entry barriers for entrepreneurs, in particular, access to critical business information (Kristiansen, Furuholt and Wahid, 2003).

For example, digitalisation enables and improves entrepreneurs’ access to information through digital information sources, such as social media and web-based platforms (Guan et al., 2017; Jansen, van de Wijngaert and Pieterson, 2010; Orrensalo and Nikou, 2021a). The use of digital information sources (Ivanytska et al., 2021), reduces the cost of infrastructure, time constraints and human labour (Dinet, 2014). Information acquired from digital sources allows entrepreneurs to reach relevant, accurate and timely information for their business needs (Chatterjee, Dutta Gupta and Upadhyay, 2020), which leads to an increase in entrepreneurs’ understanding of the market environments that support their activities, decision-making process and the business growth and outcome (Sahut, Iandoli and Teulon, 2021). Although literature has shown the benefits of digital information sources for entrepreneurial activities to compete in high pressure and dynamic environments (Sahut, Iandoli and Teulon, 2021), current research does not present a comprehensive conceptual model that examines the entrepreneurs’ digital information sources selection. The selection of digital information sources may not happen in isolation but requires the identification of factors influencing such behaviour (for example, Zaremohzzabieh et al., 2016).

Introduction

The digitalisation of society is an issue subject to scholarly attention (for example, Tsekeris, 2018; Valenduc and Vendramin, 2017, 2–4), particularly in respect of its reshaping of economic, political and cultural landscapes, including the transformation of work (for example, Toven-Lindsey, 2017). It is now possible to delegate decision-making for workplace practices such as hiring, training and on-boarding to non-human entities and ‘algorithmic bosses’ and work placements can be reconfigured into an online format (Beer, 2017; Duffy, 2020, 103; de Haas et al., 2020). While workplaces are subject to continuous change and pressure to innovate (Oeij et al., 2019), automation and alterations to the spatiotemporal organisation of labour also impact individual work experiences (Hoskyn et al., 2020; Kingma, 2019; Gill, 2020, 146).

In addition to the challenges associated with working within such an environment, many workers face considerable job precarity: an increased experience of inequality and insecurity accompanied by the destabilisation of institutions (Kwon and Lane, 2016, 10). Job precarity has grown steadily since the 2008 financial crisis and has led to the development of multiple anti-precarity agendas that call for an improvement of working conditions through trade union and government engagement (Paret, 2016, 111). When employers no longer offer job stability and/or vertical progression opportunities to their employees, working trajectories can become disassociated from the identification of a single career for life (Rodrigues and Guest, 2010). Thus, individuals need to be prepared to navigate a number of career transitions across their working lifespan (Bezanson, Hopkins and Neault, 2016; Lyons, Schweitzer and Ng, 2015; Todolí-Signes, 2017).

Attitudes to work are also changing in ways that may prompt voluntary career mobility and necessitate an increased preparedness for managing changeable career pathways. In pursuit of a better work-life balance, greater job satisfaction and career advancement opportunities, many workers seek more fulfilling work (for example, Chan et al., 2020; Kidd, 2008). This trend has been especially pronounced in recent years. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a global phenomenon known as ‘the great resignation’, whereby large numbers of workers resign from their jobs in protest at poor working conditions (Sheather and Slattery, 2021, 1).

Introduction

A key feature of digitalisation is making information available through digital technologies (McAfee and Brynjolfsson, 2014). Through the exponential increase in the capacity of digital infrastructures, a fact of contemporary digitalisation is the increased amount of digital information available and the new platforms available to work together digitally (Yoo et al., 2012). With these aspects comes the increased challenge of understanding, using and managing information – the challenge of information literacy (Bawden, 2001).

The concept of information literacy entails all sorts of skills and abilities related to the managing of information, such as identifying, accessing or constructing it; evaluating and managing it; and analysing and synthesising it (Martin and Grudziecki, 2006). These skills and abilities have been argued to be collectively anchored (Martin and Steinkuehler, 2010) and are fundamental for modern workplaces (Ahmad, Widén and Isto, 2020), more so due to digitalisation. Indeed, organisations today critically depend on their ability to use and manage information in an era of information overload.

However, not all organisations are necessarily overwhelmed with inform - ation. Some information may, for example, deliberately be kept amongst those at the executive level of the organisation or within specific groups or departments through deliberate information management processes (Whyte and Levitt, 2010). Often, organisations also work hard on managing which information is made available to people outside of the organisation (Costas and Grey, 2014). In some organisations, this deliberate limiting of information is a way to prevent third parties accessing critical information, since information that falls ‘into the wrong hands’ may disrupt organisational activities in different ways (Cram, Proudfoot and D’Arcy, 2017). In these situations, information is considered ‘sensitive’. Studies of sensitive information have in the past engaged with the problems of how sensitive information is still drawn upon, despite being subjected to a sharing-protecting tension, particularly in contexts of inter-organisational co-operation where distrust and disparate motives reign among involved parties (Bouty, 2000; Das and Teng, 2000; Jarvenpaa and Majchrzak, 2008). These studies indicate the need to not only use and manage information, but also point to the importance of organisational members ‘sensing’ how to navigate information without risking detrimental ‘oversharing’ across organisational boundaries (Jarvenpaa and Majchrzak, 2016).

In today's world, information plays an increasingly essential role in the smooth functioning of our society (Dufva and Wäyrynen, 2020). The last few decades have seen a considerable surge in the production and consumption of information at all levels and spheres of society across family, media, education, religion and the workplace. Even pre-industrial eras of humanity were dependent on information for societal advancement. Nevertheless, the phenomenal growth in the volume, velocity and variety of information alongside technological developments has resulted in the novel ways in which information contributes to social and economic development. At no point in history did human welfare and progress so much depend on efficient management of information as today (Floridi, 2009; Ziemba, 2019). Whether we can claim to have developed a perfect information society is subject to debate. But, without doubt, the world has experienced extensive ‘informatisation’ resulting in the information industry becoming a major part of modern economies while simultaneously changing the ways in which people interact with information in their day-to-day lives. All while technology is becoming embedded in everything and attention on equity aspects of digitalisation becomes increasingly important (Dufva, 2020).

The evolution of modern information societies has been possible largely because of technological developments and we have been living the digital transformation for quite a while now (Hilbert, 2022). Information and communication technology (ICT) has enabled us to connect in unprecedented ways. The information landscape of the world would not have been this dynamic if it was not for the affordances of information technology. Digital tools and technologies are increasingly part of our everyday life as well as our working life, affecting how we communicate, interact and perform different activities. Technology also comes with important challenges, such as risks with use of data, who decides how to develop technology and for what purposes (Dufva and Wäyrynen, 2020). Some technologies have been around for so long that they are already well integrated into our ways of acting. Still, we are in the midst of rapid technological development and new digital innovations are constantly knocking on the door, asking for an agile introduction to our everyday lives, to workplaces and to society at large.