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.

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.

How do you define culture?

When we talk about positive or healthy cultures, we mean cultures of engaged employees aligned with an organisation’s values – the organisational watchwords for what drives, unites, motivates and differentiates one business from another.

Engage for Success defines engagement similarly:
"A workplace where employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success"

Values and culture are inextricably linked. Culture is the things are done ‘round here’, what it’s like at our place. Culture impacts on everything the organisation does.

Culture must be managed from within, as important a part of your brand strategy as your customer communications. This can be done with what we call, Cultural Frameworks; sets of behavioural guidelines stemming from the values setting out how people in an organisation should interact with each other
and with customers. These frameworks are about empowering employees to do what feels right individually within the framework rather than shackles to stifle. Without behaviours to drive them, values are of course, simply meaningless words on a poster.

How many UK organisations are still simply paying lip service to their brand values? Who are using them as tools to create powerful cultures to give them that common purpose and the competitive edge? What can we learn from them and what needs to happen to maintain and sustain the right sort of culture?

We've looked at culture from all angles speaking to experts and practitioners along the way. We've also looked at some of the UK best organisaitons in terms of culture to uncover how they go about it. Read it all in our report 'Culture - the true story' here

The battle for talent is well and truly on. Reputation and recommendation’s not enough

As the economic recovery continues, organisations are competing for talent on an unprecedented scale. KPMG’s recent survey of HR professionals revealed that more than 80% of respondents say that addressing skills shortages is a higher priority now than it was two years ago – and will become critical in the next two years.

Personnel Today, July 2014

So how are you approaching your talent attraction right now? Are you limbering up in the red corner preparing to knock out the competition or twiddling your thumbs in the blue corner wondering what to do next?

How can you package up your offer in the most compelling way? How do you make sure you and your recruitment partners are telling the same story? How do you make sure the experience promised in the ads and on your website matches that within the walls of your organisation?

This is how

Treat your potential employees like you’d treat your customers with engaging, relevant communication based on insight.

Use your brand values to make sure the promise in your recruitment comms is aligned with your culture. Get it right first time by employing people who demonstrate they’ll fit with your culture; recruit for attitude as much as skills.

You don’t need to be Mars, Unilever or Coca Cola to get this right. We’ve recently done just this for two clients in professional services. A strategic planning led research programme, including key messaging workshops defined a compelling and competitive value proposition for our clients as the potential employer of choice. From this we developed distinctive visual identities to act as blueprints for all talent attraction communications, whatever the channel, and striking creative campaigns to put them both firmly on the talent map.

It's worth adding a postscript that you don't need a mega media budget to raise the recruitment bar. The key is in uncovering your value proposition then developing a platform of consistent content to use wherever, whenever and however you want to get your message out there.   

The values – behaviours disconnect, a cautionary tale

Christmas time is here, and with it the usual personal sprint to get all presents bought, wrapped and dispatched to the 4 corners of the globe by the start of December (lovely having an Aussie husband; great for BBQs, super trips to the southern hemisphere etc etc but not a helpful addition to one’s life when it comes to relatives living in inconvenient places for present delivery with frankly outrageously early last postage date – 5th December, honestly? Is it jumping there in a Christmas stocking?)



So, against this non self-imposed crazy Christmas backdrop of stress inducing deadlines I needed what follows like a turkey needs 25th December. 

The edited version…Having somewhat ironically signed up to Amazon’s free trial of its supposedly speedy one day delivery service, I found myself 7 days and various fruitless conversations with the delivery company’s customer services later, still without my order. Here’s my issue -  it’s not  so much that technological and human cock ups caused my order to go AWOL, it’s the fact that the company had ample opportunity to make things right, but, well, just….didn’t.  On the afternoon of the 7th day, the delivery service, much like the Lord, was resting. Nothing we can do, all the delivery drivers have all gone on their merry delivering ways, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow when off they all trundle again.  

No solution at all. 

Never mind that you’ve missed your deadline Ms Customer, ruined your week, wasted your time. Nothing we can do. Their values “Respect, Accountability, Passion, Flexibility, Hard Work and Honesty” . Hmm, simply words on a website. I think so.     

The crux of it is that many organisations are still not using their values to create frameworks of behaviours to empower their people to offer the best customer service. Or if they are, they’re not getting the message through to their people. Pioneers like Pret are leading the way and reaping the rewards as they do. We know it works.

So come on UK businesses, make 2014 the year when you use your values to create meaningful, relevant employee behaviours that are understood, lived, recognised and rewarded. Your customers will love you for it. 

Since when did my life become so busy I don’t even have time to breathe?

I am about to start seeing a breathing physio. 

Oh yes, amongst my many skills and talents, breathing apparently isn't one of them.

How on earth can I forget to breathe when at any given moment I only have a wordpress site to build for my blogging 9 year old daughter on a mission to become a discovered poet while getting a 6^th round of toast for my unfillable 7 year old son  while reading the deeply philosophical tome “Bees are Stripy” (so they are) for the 100^th time that day to my 15 month old (who has become rather Father Jack in her single word demands of late ‘READ’ ‘READ’) while thinking about the presentation I am giving tomorrow and the tweet I must send and the text I haven’t yet answered to my best friend, stirring the supper while coming up with the killer 48 point word on the ‘Words with Friends’ app on my iphone to beat my adversary in tennis and words games alike (aka my Dad) while sorting out the uniforms for the morning and testing the middle child on his spellings while googling the address for his match on Friday and musing if we have enough bedding to clean the blasted hamster who seemed like a good idea at the time (whose early demise I secretly fantasise about) while on the phone to Mr D to discuss the progress on the refund for the hire car idiots in Portugal who thought it perfectly reasonable customer service to drag a family party of 6 to an industrial estate in the middle of Lisbon post flight only to inform them they didn't actually have the 7 seater we’d booked AT ALL but here, have a 5 seater, Grandma in the roof-box, no problems and oh could he possibly stop and pick up a bottle of red on his way home and and and…..and BREATHE.

Your 30s are, so the research tells us, the busiest time in a woman’s life. Apparently there’s only 1 hour in every 24 that we have to ourselves. The ever present 21^st century juggle of work and family compounded by the multitude of communication channels we wrap around us leaving us, literally it seems, struggling for breath.

What to do? Employers I think, nowadays, have an even greater responsibility to ensure their staff are allowed to strike the right mutually beneficial balance between work and home, and work extra hard to create positive brand centred cultures in their workplaces. Putting employees first.

Mine? Well JM has happily agreed to let my physio session take place in the office as Woodreed live (and breathe!) the importance of looking after your employees to increase engagement. (Although secretly I think she wants to chuckle at the ‘OMMMMMMMMMs’ that will invariably be emitting from the boardroom as I am finding the time to learn to breathe.)  

Internal marketing - make your brand work for you

Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2, has been saying some things* about brand lately. What's a CEO doing talking about brand? Isn't that the role of a marketing agency or team?

Source - Marketing Magazine

No, of course not and with increasing debate about how to get marketing taken seriously at the top table this is valuable endorsement of just how important brand is to an organisation's success.

Dunne's mantra, "Your brand should lead your company, rather than your company leading the brand" is music to the ears of those of us who believe that brands are as important inside a company as outside, that brands are a powerful catalyst for driving employee engagement.

Coming up with strong and effective internal communication ideas

Maybe it's no surprise that Dunne's 02 is a sponsor of Engage for Success, the national movement of leading plcs, public sector, government and trade bodies committed to overturning the UK's £26bn GDP deficit caused, they claim, by poor levels of employee engagement.

Successful organisations need strong and authentic values to engage their people and what better tool for this than brand? When brand values and employee behaviours are aligned, creating what we at Woodreed call a 'cultural framework', then the brand's power is unleashed to create engaged employees - who in turn deliver improved bottom line profit, or, in the case of not-for-profits, an increased surplus.

Employee engagement and brand

Dunne goes on to say, "Failure to invest in your brand values is a false economy" and cites O2's investment in 30,000 work-skills opportunities for young people. A clear example of HR and marketing working together, breaking down the silos that exist in so many companies where brand is the prerequisite of marketing and people are HR's responsibility.

The result of this is that often whilst external communications are carefully crafted with rigour and expertise and grounded in the brand values, internal communication ideas are often cold, process-driven, tick-box exercises devoid of the emotional values and capacity for audience engagement which the brand can deliver.

Putting the power of brand at the heart of all external and internal communication ideas is the answer.

* Marketing Magazine
This blog first appeared at FindGood's marketing blog

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.

"Uggh a culture we must change"

So said a respondent to Woodreed's recent survey in our Brand Inside Report.

And it seems they weren't alone, with only 29% of respondents reporting that their organisation has "a great culture of people living our values." A worrying 20% reported a culture yes, but "not the one we want" and over a quarter of respondees said their organisation had "no sense of what we stand for internally" at all.  Not great results for UK plc but, given the recent wake of corporate scandals and misdemeanours, not perhaps that surprising.

So what's the answer?

Engaging on an emotional level is four times more valuable than rational engagement when it comes to driving employee effort, yet all too often internal comms are cold and rational - devoid of the emotive power a brand can deliver.

A well defined cultural framework, grounded in brand values and delivered through a strategic and integrated internal communications programme can effectively fix the disconnect and successfully embed the values amongst employees in a sustainable way to help create the right kinds of values-based cultures for the long-term.

Employee engagement is becoming a board issue and rightly so.  What boards now need to do is direct HR and Marketing to work together, to combine their brand and people expertise and share some resources too.  But don't panic Marketeers, a little spent inside goes a very long way and don't forget there's a direct and proven link between engaged employees and your bottom line revenue.

Recognition and reward - the greatest missed opportunity

Right now the need to keep your people engaged, motivated and productive has never been greater.  We know there's a direct, proven link between engaged employees and increased turnover and profitability - it's called the Service Profit Chain.

So engaging your employees really matters; and recognising and rewarding your people is one of the best ways to do this.

According to Jeffrey Pfeffer*, “high involvement companies (those who empower, actively engage, recognise and reward employees (in good times and bad) have consistently outperformed their competitors over the long haul."

In organisations where big remuneration packages and the annual bonus are not the core reward mechanism for the majority, and where salaries of those at the coal face are more in line with the national average, brand-centred recognition and reward programmes can represent the biggest opportunity to engage staff each and every day.

The best recognition and reward schemes are created directly in line with the brand and have a powerful ripple effect through a company, creating a culture of recognition. A place where people enjoy their time because they know the contributions they make are noticed. It allows an organisation to shine lights on those best living the brand, encouraging others to do so as they go.

So why in Woodreed's Brand Inside Survey were 37% of organisations still approaching R&R with generic token offerings made in an ad hoc way and a shocking 20% having no process of reward and recognition at all?

*Jeffrey Pfeffer, The Human Equation. Building profits by putting people first

Step away from the keypad

Harvard Business Review carried a piece this week by Daniel Gelati about multi-tasking which certainly chimed.  Of course multi-tasking is now 'de rigueur' for almost everyone these days as smartphones, tablets, laptops, even now TVs, give us the option to do more things simultaneously in one minute than our forebears did in a week.

As with all modern advances this is a mixed blessing.  Woodreed, like many other businesses I'm sure, has unleashed enormous value, tangible and intangible, for ourselves and for our clients, from enabling remote working, especially for parents juggling childcare with work commitments.  The mere introduction of two PC monitors means I can now keep even more balls in the air than I ever could before - and believe me that's a lot.

But at what price - to ourselves and those we live and work with?

Unlike our capacity for love which is not reduced in any way the more it is spread amongst those closest to us, our capacity for multi-tasking means that we are giving less and less attention, consideration and care to each task we add to the mix.  A lot of the time this doesn't matter, we can do things on the hoof and with an eye on something else, but much of the time something, or someone, has to give.

Gelati describes the '"provisional conversation": a face-to-face discussion that falls apart as one or more participants default to checking their phones, only to restart as the handsets are put away.'

How many of us have been in meetings, either with clients, prospective clients, our boss or colleagues, where one, or shockingly many more, of the participants have one eye on their iPhones or Blackberries?  Where those who are supposed to be listening to you, engaging with you, simply giving you the courtesy of the time of day, are suddenly distracted by composing a quick response to some inbound email or text which cannot be ignored?  Or worse posting on Facebook? Not only is it just damn rude to those present but tell me the quality of the response isn't undermined too and wouldn't have been better for some calm reflection at a later time?  Are we really all so, so important and so pivotal that the world will stop turning if we don't respond in a nano-second?

So isn't it time we all stood up and were counted and showed each other a little more respect?  Why is it a sign of corporate status to come to a meeting with your phone/tablet and then give it a place at the table? Is mine bigger than yours, really? Come on let's make it unacceptable to turn up at a meeting and place your smartphone on the table - turn it off and put it away. When you are in a meeting - formal or informal turn the phone off, ignore the monitor screen, step away from the keyboard.

Tell your boss if they're disrespecting you by allowing themselves to be distracted. Or suggest an alternative time/place to meet if you can't quite bring yourself to be too direct. Gelati cites the junior consultant who suggested that "moving to an empty chair on the opposite side of the room gave the senior partner space to wrap up her email and slide over to me when she was ready to talk."

Let's work out ways to put a stop to the worse aspects of this, and let's challenge our own behaviour too - because of course we are all guilty of it.

To read David's piece in full click here Harvard Business Review

Whose responsibility is it anyway?

A particular topic which has really galvanised readers of our Brand Inside Report was the question of who has responsibility for employee engagement inside an organisation.  One reader observed that the answer lies with the CMO in that if we can "unleash the power of the brand inside then mountains can be moved."


Another agreed that best practice must be led by the Board with "HR and Marketing working much more collegiately, dispensing with the conflicting agendas and silo approach to ensure employee engagement is a shared responsibility."



So a challenge to all brand marketers out there - are you prepared to make the necessary changes in skills, priorities and budgets to unlock the immense power your brand has to engage not only with your external audience but your internal one too?


If you're not - why not? The topic is increasingly coming to the top of the CEO/boardroom agenda and they will be looking to you as the guardian of their brand to answer for your stewardship.  With rising demands for better value returns all the time, diverting just a small part of your brand investment this way makes good, good sense. 


Let us know what you think and if you're an HRD or marketeer tell us what help you need to drive this change in your business and really create a brand-hearted culture inside. 


Of course if what's holding you back is knowing how to go about it, then the team at Woodreed would be delighted to lend you a helping hand.

Pret's profits prove our point

Reading the Guardian's recent piece about Pret a Manger's profit boost brought a smile to my face.


Reminded me of course of my Aussie friends' delightful insistence when first arriving in London on pronouncing that great sandwich place as Pret a Manger- rhymes with hanger (say it out loud with an upward intonation at the end and you'll crack it!)


That and the 500 new jobs Pret are creating aside, the profit boost is a cracking endorsement of Woodreed's favourite and much vaunted 'Service Profit Chain'*.  We often cite Pret in the client workshops we run as a great example of an organisation who gets the importance of a healthy internal culture which is firmly grounded in their brand values. So it's great to see yet more hard evidence for why this matters.


The Guardian writes "Service at Pret tends to be better than in comparable chains. Staff smile, chat a bit, make life marginally less horrendous...Pret treats its staff better than similar organisations do. Mystery shoppers visit every branch every week and report on the service they experience. If a branch is awarded "outstanding", as about 86% are each time, every member of staff gets an extra £1 for every hour they've worked that week. The reward is for service rather than sales."


The knock-out punch is in the final line - the reward is for service rather than sales. So there you have it - engaged employees deliver bottom line profit - FACT!


Read Guardian article in full   *The Service Profit Chain - James Heskett et al

One step forward, two steps back

Treat employees like customers....(please)

I came across a thread on linkedin today on one of the employee engagement forums I’m part of that has seriously twisted my melons man. Yet another internal comms professional casting around for free creative ideas for an employee marketing campaign amongst the Linkedin community.

Grrrrr.

As Peter Simpson, the ex commercial director of employee engagement pioneers First Direct once said “Why would you want to be one kind of brand to customers and another to employees?” He’s so right. Emotional engagement is four times more valuable than rationale engagement in driving employee effort. There’s proof everywhere you look. Why oh why do companies still insist on lavishing all their time, effort, ideas and budget on consumer marketing while treating employee communication with a lack of reverence so acute it verges on the insulting. Crazy when you think that there’s a direct and proven link between quality internal comms and increased revenue and profitability – look after your employees and they’ll look after your customers.

For what it’s worth, here’s how I responded.    

Alas, it's one step forwards two steps back in the quest to have internal communications treated with the same reverence as external. Would anyone really ever use linked in to say 'Hey - we're launching a new consumer ad campaign, anyone got any ideas for what we can put in our ads?' Of course they wouldn't. Honestly, we are never going to get internal comms and employee engagement taken seriously as a discipline as vital to a company's success as consumer marketing unless we all start treating our employees with the same respect as we do our customers.

Take a look at this for some ways to start treating employees more like customers http://bit.ly/HkDjcQ

*Gets back in box*

Can't see the wood for the trees

Last year, Woodreed published a thought piece which we called 'Bursting the boardroom bubble'.  It focussed on the importance of employee engagement and just what an important contributor it is to an organisation's bottom line.  Lots of facts, lots of proof points.  We asked has the message reached the boardroom agendas of UK companies.

The answer appears to be mixed. For every client who 'gets it', and they are increasingly out there, we come across headline stories like Goldman Sachs, News Corp, RBS et al where the culture appears to be far from healthy.  What some of these worst examples share is an inability to see what's going wrong. Without kissing and telling we've sat in a meeting in the C-suite of one of the headline grabbing organisations and been assured in all seriousness and with a total commitment to the party line that everything in the garden is rosy.  More than rosy, positively blooming and sweet smelling.

Sometimes it's a refusal to accept that perhaps, just perhaps, top leadership is sending out all the wrong messages. A company culture based on a load of vacuous words on a poster which, even if they are robust and grounded, nobody in the senior team is seen to live.  Is anyone walking the walk or are they just talking the talk?  Are they even doing that?

And even if they get all this are they prepared to invest the time and money to do something about it? Disappointingly those of us who practice in this area still come across senior managers and executives who say they've got far too many pressing operational issues on their plates just now to bother about employee engagement.  Employee engagement is all pink and fluffy after all isn't it? 

Well no. Wake up UK plc and smell the coffee. What's pink and fluffy about a cost to the UK economy of £64bn?  Yes, £64bn.  The annual cost to the UK economy of disengagement.  Pink and fluffy?  I think not.

So what's the answer? It lies in your brand.  It lies in a commitment to create and lead a brand-hearted culture from the very top of an organisation.  If you want to know how to go about then read Bursting the boardroom bubble

The cure for the common blog

So I guess first of all, welcome to our new audience. Up until this week we've blogged for our eyes only. So now it's my turn again - but this time with the eyes of the cyber world upon me. It's the difference between singing your heart out in the shower or behind the wheel in the fast lane and taking centre stage at the karaoke bar.

Now our Woodreed blog is open to the outside world will it change the way we blog and what we blog about?

Can I, for example, talk about the sublime scene in this week's Mad Men where Peggy called the bluff of her abrasive new art director and they found themselves stark naked brainstorming new creative concepts for Vicks? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdKSDqo9FaU Can I ponder whether that approach would ever see the light of day at Woodreed - Jodie and Dave any thoughts? Or would I be venturing perilously close to employee litigation? On second thoughts......

Or could I dare comment upon the wannabee creative from the same episode who'd hopefully recycled one tired and hackneyed line across endless ads in his book: The cure for the common bank, the cure for the common chair, the cure for the common beer ... What agency would ever do such a thing?

Or should I be more business like and simply muse about how I'll be feeling this time next week? Once Charlotte and I have presented our masterclass on the power of brand as a tool for employee engagement to 200 delegates at The Travel Convention in Malta? What's really excited me putting that together with Charlotte has been the power of our presentation. It really is the culmination of so much great insight and experience - so will we inspire or will we be ....?

I'll let you know next week.