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Have you spent your trust fund?

What’s your corporate vision statement? Chances are it’s got something to do with trust. A cursory glance at the first page of Google’s 2,830,000 results for ‘vision to be the most trusted’ reveals a raft of organisations all with the same ambition…to be trusted.

     

“To be recognised as the most trusted partner to our global clients”

“To be the most trusted source of aviation and high-integrity solutions in the world”    

“To be the most trusted provider of essential services…”

    

“To be our customers' most valued and trusted business partner”

   

“To be the world’s most trusted financial group”

           

And on it goes…

          

Compare this with declining levels of trust inside organisations, and we reckon there's more chance of Eddie the Eagle popping up and pipping Usain Bolt at the post in Rio, than ambitions like these ever being realised.
   

Woodreed’s been thinking about the issue of organisational trust, and how businesses can begin to bridge the gap between their ambitions for customer trust and levels of trust inside their own organisations.

Read on here.

Know F all about Gen Y? Get the IQ PDQ

#downwiththekids

PWC estimate that the millennial generation, or Gen Y ( born roughly between 1980 and 2000) will make up half of the global workforce by 2020. They are a generation like none other, with expectations and demands of their own that will reshape the world of work.

I’ve been in a couple of meetings recently with clients of a certain seniority and of a certain age whose lack of knowledge about them was startlingly evident. OK so they knew they had some 25 year olds milling about their office, but they didn’t know just how different they are from generations gone before them or how to even begin to engage them in the workplace.

Tech firms and TV, music and media bods and the like have it sussed, as it’s Gen Y central there; all hipster beards, BYOD, dogs in the office, gin flavoured popcorn and knowing whose Spotify playlists to follow. It’s the more established traditional, dare I say it old school employers, who make up the majority of global businesses in terms of number of employees who need to play serious catch up.

Woodreed’s been thinking about the Millennial generation at work and have written a report which helps senior leaders and internal communicators gain insight into this unique generation. We think it’s an essential read. If you’d like a look, grab yourself an organic fair trade soy latte with a shot of caramel and click here to read the report in full.

From Tunbridge Wells with love

What is that one phrase that makes you think? What is that one phrase that makes you smile? What is that one phrase that makes you stop what you are doing and focus on the person who said it?

I love you.

Think back to the first time you heard that said to you. 

Think about where it was. 

Think about how it made you feel. 

Think about how many times you’ve heard it since.

Thought about it? Good. 

Like how your attention has been nicely diverted whilst reading this blog post? Well the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council has done the same with their road work’s messaging on the A21.

The message is “Someone loves you”.

Now this is supposed to make you drive carefully through the road works so you can return to your loved one/s. However, it completely distracts you from driving. It makes you think about something other than driving. It does the exact opposite of what it was meant to do.

The TWBC has clearly tried to use emotion to force safer driving. But if they had read a bit further into behavioural economics they would have seen that “emotions can act as triggers of other mental states (stored memories, new beliefs, new preferences, and the like)” (Cecchi, 2015). Stored memories is what I am really trying to drive home here (excuse the pun). If you are accessing stored memories you are not focusing on the job in hand. And that job is driving.

Happy to hear your thoughts on this too, so please leave a comment.

The Engagement's off

There’s a whiff of heresy in the air this week (thank you Wolf Hall) and I’m about to add to it.

We need to stop talking about employee engagement. That’s it.  Let’s put it out there.

The problem with employee engagement is the terminology.  The minute you give it a name the arguments start.  What does it mean?  Yeah, but is that really right? What else should we call it? How do we define it? How many angels on the head of a pin? Yada, yada, yada….

More importantly as soon as you give it a label it then has to become someone’s responsibility.  And whose responsibility should it be?  And if it’s someone’s responsibility then it will need to be measured.  So how do we measure it? 

Re-wind.  Stop.

If we stop calling it ‘employee engagement’ then it all becomes so much easier.  
Let’s stop debating the terminology and focus on the outcomes instead.  Then it becomes clear that it’s a whole business issue with real value and benefits to the organisation.  It’s a board level, leadership level, managerial level, team leader level responsibility.

With proven outcomes like these:

• Profit – twice the net profit; 2.5 x revenue growth 
• Customer satisfaction – 12% higher customer advocacy
• Productivity – 18% higher
• Innovation – 59% of employees at their most creative
• Absence – down by 50%
• Turnover and retention – 40% lower turnover
• Health and safety – fewer workplace accidents
• Efficiency – 35%
Source: Engage for Success

Let’s stop talking about employee engagement as a topic, a discipline or an endgame and focus instead on doing 4 things that will make a difference to all of these business KPIs: 

1. Have visible, empowering leaders who can share a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.
2. Recruit, train and support your managers to better focus their people and give them scope; treating them as individuals, coaching and stretching.
3. Give your employees a voice for reinforcing and challenging views;  acknowledge them as central to solving your business challenges and driving innovation.
4. Have organisational integrity – make sure the values on the wall are reflected in the day to day behaviours of EVERYONE in the business, at all levels. There is no ‘say – do’ gap, anywhere.

These 4 enablers all underpinned by your brand, the driver of emotional engagement, are the catalyst for transformational change within any organisation. 

As you implement policies to address these you’ll see improvements to KPIs and you WILL be enjoying underlying employee engagement improvement too – no more measuring employee engagement one dimensionally with employee surveys.

So stop the love affair with employee engagement and embrace business success instead.

Culture - 2014 word of the year

So it turns out that Culture was the word of the year in 2014.  According to Merriam-Webster, America's leading dictionary publisher’s analysis of the top lookups at its online dictionary, Culture was the most searched word from a staggering 100 million lookups per month:


1. Culture
2. Nostalgia
3. Insidious
4. Legacy
5. Feminism
6. Je ne sais quoi
7. Innovation
8. Surreptitious
9. Autonomy
10. Morbidity 

Although by no means a top 10 of corporate words it got me thinking.

1. Culture – I’m not at all surprised it’s at no.1. It certainly is for us at Woodreed where we’ve been banging on about the importance of organisational culture for ages – “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”(Drucker) after all doesn’t it? In 2014 we published our own take on the topic from an organisational perspective – Culture the true story. When we talk about positive cultures, we mean cultures of engaged employees aligned with an organisation’s values – the watchwords for what drives, unites, motivates and differentiates one business from another. A positive culture isn’t just a nice to have. It’s a competitive advantage. It’s people that give you the edge. You can copy technology, you can copy process, you can copy the product. You can’t copy the culture. It truly is Number One.

2. Nostalgia – is there a hankering in the workplace for some long lost halcyon age? If so when was it?  In our own ad industry Mad Men is of course a must watch show, but, putting aside the Martinis, do we really want to return to an age of such stratification, ingrained with sexism and racism, both in the workplace and society at large?

3. Insidious – the much propagated, and yet still widely held, perception that employee engagement is somehow pink and fluffy or doesn’t apply to us or is HR’s job, that soft skills don’t really matter in the work place.  Keep holding on to this belief system and you’ll find yourself in the area of the 4th word of the year – legacy!

4. Legacy – legacy systems! Yes, hard to believe I know but in 2014 there are still corporate organisations still struggling along with Lotus Notes.  But as businesses upgrade and invest in new technology it brings a raft of opportunities not just for employee engagement, collaboration and work life balance – good things – but also of course threats to the perfect life balance with a potential ‘always on’ culture (there’s that word again). Canadian employee engagement expert David Zinger talked recently instead of ‘work life infusion’ as one can in a healthy way infuse the other – of course new technology, used sensibly, can certainly play its part in making this happen.

5. Feminism – see number 2 above.  But the job is by no means done – in the workplace or outside.  Feminism seemed to get a resurgence in 2014 – both in the wider world with No More Page Three and the recognition of the great work of Laura Bates at the Everyday Sexism Project.  And of course the efforts of so many in trying to get more women onto the boards of plcs. Despite research cited in Management Today which shows that Fortune 500 firms with three or more women on their boards outperformed those without any between 2004 and 2008, still the FTSE 250 has 29 all male boards – shameful.

6. Je ne sais quoi – Odd that this snuck into the list, apparently it appeared in a US TV ad and drove the lookups. But of course we’re all French now in January 2015 – yes free speech, honesty, transparency, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for what you believe in. As important in the workplace as outside. Je suis Charlie, Je suis Ahmed.

7. Innovation – the key to business success and an absolute must if an organisation is still going to be around in ten year’s time.  But don’t think of innovation as just a job for leaders and futurologists – the most successful businesses are recognising the value of involving all their people in the process of innovation and using new technology, like that of Woodreed’s partner Challengera, to unlock and harness their knowledge and energy – and of course push the dial on employee engagement too.

8. Surreptitious – the way to approach employee engagement.  Don’t set out to ‘do’ an engagement campaign, don’t tell your workforce you’re going to ‘engage’ them, don’t approach employee engagement as a project, something to be done and ticked off the ‘to do’ list.  Approach it as just the way things are done around here – but do it with a clear strategy and plan and do it by unleashing the power of your brand to engage your audience. We know that the emotional engagement people have with brands is a far more powerful driver of behaviour than rational – as much as four times, so use that power to force behaviour change and create the right kind of positive and successful organisational culture you need to achieve your business goals.  And if you don’t think you have a brand then stay behind and talk to me after class.

9. Autonomy – the great Dan Pink’s favourite three words. Autonomy, mastery and purpose being the three drivers of motivation – more powerful than monetary incentives, although try telling that to the banking community at bonus time!  If this has passed you by what rock have you been hiding under for the last goodness knows how long?

10. Morbidity – the only certainty in life along with taxes (unless you’re Jimmy Carr, Starbucks or Vodafone of course). So as it’s the direction of travel we’re all heading in I for one want to have some fun along the way and that means working at something I’m absolutely passionate about – using brand to engage employees and make workplaces better places to be. We know that organisations who treat their employees like customers are more successful than those who don’t – end of.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/2014-word-of-the-year.htm

Creativity Works: making magic on TV

Last week the airwaves, cyberspace and print media exploded with debate about is it or isn't it disrespectful for Sainsbury's to use their telling of the story of the 1914 Christmas Truce for something as grubby and commercial as selling more groceries.

Just before that furore broke Patrick and I attended an event organised by Thinkbox which brought together the great and the good to share and debate some of the very best (the most creative and effective) of our UK Tv ads - how 'Creativity Works - making magic on TV'. Clips included John Lewis' #MontythePenguin and JS' #ChristmasTruce as well as other gems from Three, Thomson holidays and Marmite amongst others.

It was a great event, really worth of our blog name - "Things that inspire."

We learned how great campaigns need brave clients - ready to embrace new and exciting ideas and fight for their survival against often sceptical exec teams. And that emotional advertising delivers a greater ROI than a rational campaign.

We learned how great campaigns need single-minded directors with a clear vision of what they're trying to achieve.

And we learned that one of the most important ingredients is trust.  The more clients trust their agencies to deliver, then the harder the agencies and their film-makers will work to deliver the very, very best work to them - and the opposite is true too.

We learned that even in this age of media fragmentation TV is still the best way to build awareness - with a typical TV campaign generating a staggering 234 million views.

We saw great work, showcased as it's meant to be on the big, big screen with pumping digital sound - ads which, irrespective of your view of the rights and wrongs of the JS campaign, make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and which make you proud to work in such a great, creative industry.

If you missed it, then take yourself off to a darkened room for four hours, pump up the sound and enjoy. 

http://www.thinkbox.tv/events-and-training/creativity-works-making-magic-on-tv/