Hello

hello – come in and make yourself at home

The Woodies have a blog. It’s a kind of collective. Not sure we’re about to start a revolution baby, but we might kindle a small debate or two and perhaps raise a smile. Anyway, rather than just blogging corporate Woodreed by fielding our top Woodie (as so many other companies seem to do in a thinly veiled attempt at impressing with their profundity), we wanted all our individual voices to be heard. An agency’s most valuable assets are its people after all. Everyone’s got something to say here and with us everyone’s ideas and opinions matter.

Each week someone different will be blogging. It's mostly about stuff that rocks our world as well as the flipside – the things that just don't cut it with us. We'll blog about inside and outside – inside this glorious industry where we work and outside in the real world.
It's a bit of an experiment, so go with us on this one.

Hope you enjoy.

Tuesday 30 April 2013

We've notched up a 9th successive year of CPD accreditation


Every Monday morning we Woodies lace up our brain trainers and work our grey matter into shape for the week ahead with our fast paced 15 minute workouts.  One week we’re coming up with ads in 60 seconds, the next thinking about our most recent customer service experience and how well those employees were living their brand. 

This is just one of many initiatives we run for our people at Woodreed which has helped us notch up a ninth successive year of CPD accreditation from our professional body - the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

CPD accreditation reassures our clients they are dealing with professional, qualified and trained individuals.  After all our people are our business.

Just because times may be tough is no reason to draw back from investing in your people - in fact quite the opposite.  We achieved our results with minimal investment of actual cash - just time and carefully considered thinking to develop a training and development framework which supports our business objectives.

The result – an engaged, happy and productive bunch, working hard for our clients.

Friday 19 April 2013

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?


Over recent weeks I've become aware of increasing debate about the EE words for example Neil Morrison's 'Nobody wants to be engaged'. EE - not the bizarrely rebranded telecomms company but Employee Engagement. A simple term which I think most people get - employee engagement as opposed to customer engagement or audience engagement, engaging the internal audience rather than the external.

There are discussions about whether EE as a term is an obstacle to the message. Whether we can think of other things to call it. Is it happiness, wellbeing, wellness or what?

This seems like so much noise, just at a time when a groundswell is beginning to build in the wake of corporate scandals and with the support of the Engage for Success movement.  To me this is typical of so many movements in the past which end up tearing themselves apart over semantics, focussing inwards instead of outwards.

What are we doing? When there is still such a mountain to climb to convince boards to invest time, resources, intellectual capital and understanding in the need for EE why do we create a distracting sideshow that can only undermine our pitch? Someone, the unerring advocate of the importance of the inside culture Ian Buckingham I think, said "Angels on pinheads" about this the other day and I have to agree.

How can we expect people to take the important concept and its practitioners seriously when we resort to squabbling amongst ourselves?

Of course debate is healthy and should be encouraged but let’s focus it where it can achieve results – on
helping overcome the barriers, on helping people see that EE isn’t something you do to people or have done to you, that EE isn’t a tick box exercise, or a series of 'initiatives'. That EE isn't an outcome. It’s about building a healthy culture within an organisation where every employee (which means all those who take a salary from the organisation so leaders and managers too) is motivated to give of their best more often that they’re not; an environment where the people with the skills to leave choose to stay.

Surely it's far better to have a word which, ok may not be perfect but at least we all understand? A word to badge the concept and act as a shorthand for something we all need to grasp - quite simply organisations with high levels of employee engagement outperform organisations who don't on so many KPIs - net profit, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, employee turnover...

These KPIs are the important evidence we have to use to convince board level decision makers of the need to take this seriously - but you know, irrespective of these I know what kind of an organisation I'd rather work in.