storytelling Archives - Axiom Communications Ltd

Secure gold by discovering your storytellers

February 22, 2018

Involving informal influencers in shaping and sharing your company’s stories, can be transformational

Gold Medal | Axiom Communications With the Winter Olympics drawing to a close it has been a great few weeks for stories. The Canadian figure skating duo, Virtue & Moir, melted hearts, with their ice dance to the ‘Moulin Rouge’ soundtrack. The story of their golden comeback, to become the most decorated figure skaters in Olympic history, has been shared worldwide. That’s the power of story.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go as far as The Games in South Korea to secure your own powerfully golden stories. Your precious resource has nothing to do with shiny medals. It has to do with a person. A person called Gold, Bill Gold.

Who is Bill Gold and why is he important?

OK, so in your organisation Bill Gold will go by another name but, trust me, you’ll have multiple Bill Golds in your business. And by identifying and investing in them to become one of your chief storytellers, you can get your corporate or change stories to spread throughout your organisation in authentic and inspirational ways.

As luck would have it, I discovered my Bill Gold and his value, early on in my communications career. If you haven’t yet met yours, let me share this precious nugget with you now.

I was at a conference, when I noticed Bill. I didn’t know him but, as a participant, he was hard to ignore because of the enormous influence he was commanding. When Bill agreed with something presented, he nodded – then everyone around him nodded. When he disagreed, he shook his head – then, following his lead, all those around shook theirs.

Subsequently, I asked a senior leader who the guy was. “Oh, that’s Bill Gold,” she said. “If you want something to happen around here you’d better get Bill on-side.”

The power of informal influencers

Bill wasn’t senior management and had no aspirations to be. But with his vast personal networks, he was influencing colleagues at all levels. What I learned that day was the power of getting him, and those like him, on-side. I’ve been doing just that ever since.

The Bill Golds of our world can be prickly, even cynical, so they are often overlooked as ‘official’ communicators. But involving them in shaping and sharing your company’s stories can be transformational.

By embracing them as storytellers, you transform both the story and the teller. The teller becomes an advocate and their story more authentic when shared.

There’s power in story. There’s power in Gold. And, at Axiom, we help businesses harness and develop both, to organically spread their own powerfully golden stories.

Seeing the wood and the trees

November 28, 2017

How to paint a picture of future success for your organisation and get your people telling stories about how their hard work makes a difference

Lady in Woods | Axiom Communications Experience tells us that staff contribute more fully to business performance when they know how the work they do day in and day out fits into the grand scheme of things. Yet all too often, when asked how their work contributes to achieving even their team’s goals, never mind the company’s, they complain they can’t see the wood for the trees.

If we consider the wood to be the context in which teams and individuals operate and the trees to be the content of their work, they need to be able to see both the wood and the trees. Indeed, if you extend the metaphor, they might also benefit from understanding the forest too, if you think of that as the marketplace in which the business operates.

Creating alignment

What’s needed is total alignment between the actions of every member of staff, wherever they work, and the delivery of business objectives. Jack, on reception, needs to be able to explain how his making customers feel welcome and valued helps Jill, the sales director, achieve her targets. And Janet, in R&D, needs to be able to articulate how her latest innovation helps John, the managing director, create new markets.

Creating a laser straight ‘line of sight’ between an individual’s daily tasks and the longer-term goals of the business is often as tricky in a small start-up as it is in a large established business. So how can you do it

A way forward

Although it’s better than nothing, sharing a spreadsheet as part of an annual objective-setting session is one way forward. But it’s hardly likely to get people throwing back the duvet and racing in to work on a daily basis.

But there are some serious signposts for a better way forward:

Paint a picture of future success for your organisation…

Show your people where you’ve come from, where you are now, where you want to be as a business and how you’re going to get there. Ideally in a single image, via a universally appropriate metaphor.

Get your people telling stories about how their hard work makes a difference…

Imagine the power of your entire workforce being able to explain back to you, in their own words, how they can contribute to the success of your business.

If you can combine the impact of a visual image with the power of storytelling, then you create a super-channel – a channel that our clients call many different things: big picture, rich image, learning map. What they all call it is successful!

Big picture success

The leader of a utilities business, referring to the success of his organisation’s big picture, said: “Eighty percent of our people who climb poles or dig holes are now aware of the business plan and their role in delivering it.”

Third-party employee research in a client from the medical devices world found a 24% improvement against the question “I know what I can do to help achieve our strategy.” And in an aviation client, 76% of around 2,000 staff said they had “a clear understanding of this company’s objectives and vision” – up 22% on the year before.

Unlike the annual objective-setting approach, a big picture can be prominently displayed as an image throughout your business and reinforced through all of your internal media. This will trigger your people to tell and retell the right kind of stories daily: forest, wood, trees, twigs, the lot. And you won’t even get a splinter trying to align them!

Find out more about Axiom’s approach to communicating the big picture.

Want to take your people on a journey? Don’t forget the strat nav!

October 23, 2016

For your organisation to execute its strategy, employees need a clear destination and a route map to follow

When facilitating conferences, I sometimes start with an icebreaker called ‘Point North’. I get everyone in the hall to stand up, close their eyes and, without talking, turn round three times on the spot. With their eyes still closed, I get them all to point North. Then I ask them to open their eyes. The inevitable result is a forest of arms pointing in multiple directions.

This little exercise serves to make the very simple point that, without adequate information, in this case, visual or auditory sensory input, it’s easy to get confused about where we’re meant to be going.

It’s something that applies to many large organisations – thousands of people are no doubt working very hard, yet their efforts are often not focused on what’s really important for the organisation’s success. ‘Point North’ sets the stage nicely for the work we often get participants to do during a conference to address this problem by setting and agreeing the organisation’s aspirations and goals, creating a common sense of direction and then creating the plan for getting there.

Indeed, that’s a fair summary of the nature of much of Axiom’s work these days. More often than not, we are working with clients who want to bring about major change in their business, often to implement a new corporate strategy. We help people at all levels in the organisation reach a shared understanding of both the destination and the route. It’s something I have recently come to think of as helping organisations navigate the strategic journey they want to take – in short, strat nav.

Paint the Big Picture

One of our favourite ways to achieve this is through our highly successful Big Picture approach. We depict an organisation’s strategy through a large-scale image that provides a visual analogy and supporting narrative for the journey being undertaken. The image shows where the organisation has come from, its current position, where it’s heading and how it’s going to get there. Crucially, it helps employees see where they fit in and how they can contribute to the journey.

In the past, we’ve illustrated company change programmes as missions into space, mountain-climbing expeditions, ambitious construction projects and major sporting events. But there’s always a common theme: a journey from the old ways of working to the new.

The Big Picture is so powerful because images can engage in a way that the written or spoken word may not. Professor Paul Martin Lester of California State University says people remember only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, but 80% of what they see and do. And in this digital age, our reliance on visual stimuli is growing. “We are becoming a visually mediated society,” says Prof Lester. “For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished not through words, but by reading images.” What’s more, images are far more immediate and memorable than documents and presentations. They also work internationally across language barriers.

Once we have a powerful visual metaphor, we then write a supporting narrative about the company’s journey. Here, we are making use of the ancient power of storytelling. Stories have been fundamental to communication throughout human history. Today, neuroscience tells us that, while facts and figures stimulate two regions of the brain, well-crafted stories trigger seven.

Stories grab attention, are more memorable and convincing than simple information, and are much more likely to lead to action. They provide a narrative everyone can buy into and get passionate about and are easily retold.

Charting a course for success

We’ve combined storytelling with visual images in our Big Picture approach for dozens of clients. For Swedish surgical equipment maker Mölnlycke, we developed a campaign that envisaged its strategy as a sailing voyage. The visual analogy we co-created made a compelling case for change and provided a clear view of what success would look like and the challenges that lay ahead year by year.

Mattias Hakeröd, global HR director at Mölnlycke, told us afterwards: “Our people really liked this approach to explaining our strategy. It helped us overcome language and cultural barriers, and now everyone is talking about the strategy at all levels – including those who wouldn’t usually engage.”

Set the direction, provide the route, take people with you on the journey

Of course, the Big Picture is just one possible approach. We’ve just recently finished helping the UK arm of a major global merchant with a simple, pragmatic communication campaign executed against a very demanding timeline to help their people embark on a major two-year change journey. The organisation was announcing a radical new strategy that involved significant investment, merging and closure of branches and a rebrand. For some colleagues, change would be exciting and promising; for others, it would mean disruption and the threat of redundancy.

We worked with the top team to put together a management event, a series of briefings across the company and a range of engaging communication materials to persuade people of the importance of the changes and allay their concerns. At the outset, it was essential that we openly and truthfully gave colleagues the context – the market dynamics that made the changes essential, the long-term aims, the major milestones along the way – as well as helping them work out what it all meant for them at a local, individual, day-to-day level. The feedback we’ve had so far has been very encouraging – employees seem to be buying into the change plan and the approach to communicating it.

Whatever the method, getting everyone to be clear on the destination, engage in the journey and understand the detailed route map – that’s the task for communicators today. So maybe it’s time for you to work out how you’re going to provide a strat nav for your organisation?

Building communication capability

July 15, 2015

Workshops help staff make maximum impact during major organisational change

More than 100 patient safety specialists at AstraZeneca have taken part in workshops to equip them with the communication and interpersonal skills to make more impact than ever before.

Designed and run by Axiom, the training supported a major project, billed as One Patient Safety, that brings together previously separate patient safety teams at AstraZeneca into a single organisation with a consistent way of working.

Patient Safety leaders reviewed our range of engagement skills workshops and chose four to include in a global ‘capability build’. In May and June, Axiom’s Chris Carey and Miles Henson led workshops in the US and Sweden on:

In their feedback, participants gave an average rating of 9.3 out of 10 for the communication capability workshops. Their comments included:

“Lively, lots of new info, practical.”
“Blend of great examples, practical, useful.”
“I learned a number of new things about negotiating that I can put into practice.”
“Engaging and provided real-world evidence for adopting a positive view.”
“I thought I knew everything about presentations – before this course!”

Our work to support One Patient Safety has also included writing and producing a range of printed and digital communication materials to engage staff worldwide. More workshops for Patient Safety staff are scheduled around the world later this year.

See our range of in-house communication skills workshops.

To convey vision, use Big Picture communication

April 2, 2015

How to bring your vision or strategy to life with Big Picture communication, so your people get it, remember it, believe in it – and know what they need to do make it happen

“Look, we’ve got a crystal-clear vision for this business,” a CEO of a global business once told me, having spent, it seemed to me, the GDP of a small country with a consulting firm to get to it.

I sat at his shiny boardroom table, sharpening my employee-engagement pencil to make notes. “We need to grow market share by X% against a background of declining volumes, we need upper-quartile EBIT, we need to improve ROI by Y% and we need to cut headcount and waste by Z%. But when I talk to people about all this, no-one seems to get it – they just stare at me blankly. What do they want me to do? Draw them a [expletive deleted!] diagram?”

“Well, probably, yes…I think that would help enormously,” I replied. And so began a project to bring his vision (the clue is in the word) to life globally so that everyone in the business, at all levels and all around the world, could see what he meant, could remember it, believe in it and, most importantly, knew what they needed to do to make it a reality.
[Read more…]

In pod we trust: A beginner’s guide to podcasts

March 4, 2015

Want to use the immediacy and impact of podcasting to enhance engagement in your organisation?

Start with these guidelines from Axiom associate and seasoned audio producer Mik Wilkojc

“What exactly is a podcast?” That’s a question I’m often asked as someone with a background in national radio and a producer of corporate audio programmes. The simple answer is it’s a term combining the ‘pod’ of ‘iPod’ with the ‘cast’ of ‘broadcast’. It refers to an audio file you download from a website or intranet onto your computer, tablet or smartphone – and then listen to when and where you like.

But, as with any potent means of communication, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Consider content and copyright

I define the ‘pod’ element as Personally Overseen Data. As a podcaster, you are a publisher, and hence responsible for the content and copyright of the material you disseminate. This means that, in the real world, you don’t have carte blanche.

Let’s look at content first. As with any published format, you are covered by the law of libel. In a nutshell, don’t podcast anything false or malicious that might damage a person or organisation’s reputation. This isn’t to say you can’t be controversial, challenging or cheeky; just be sure you can back up what you say.

The other © is for copyright and this refers to the exclusive and assignable legal right a creator has over their material. You may have listened to podcast versions of programmes made by major broadcasters, such as the BBC, where the speech is as transmitted – because they own it – but the music has been chopped out. This is because the broadcaster has paid-for permission for conventional transmission via the airwaves, but would have to pay again for podcast rights, which can be pretty expensive. The rule-of-thumb is don’t use commercial music, soundtrack extracts of film or TV and avoid modern literature and poetry. Believe me, it’s a minefield.

Even so, you can, at reasonable cost, use ‘production music’ to ‘dress’ your podcasts. You can buy for this for limited distribution in your podcast. Alternately, you could ask around and see if there’s a budding musician who might knock-up – cheap or for free – some beds (music or sound effect played in the background) and idents (a jingle or other sound effect that identifies your programme).

You might be thinking: “But I’m only broadcasting to a bunch of colleagues across a couple of sites.” That may be the case, but with the proliferation of social media, you’d be amazed how quickly, and inadvertently, something can go global. You might at first be pleased by that, but there are plenty of exposed backsides out there in the ether that were intended for an audience of one. Just saying.

Harness the power of the human voice

As important as content and copyright is the mood, the timbre, the vibe you want to engender. You want to be informative without being tedious. Authoritative, without being authoritarian.

In the corporate sphere, it helps to find someone to front a podcast who speaks the language of management, but has the common touch with the audience. They have to adapt a third way of manipulating their speech – the one that sits between normal conversation and making a presentation. Ideally, they have to be a natural storyteller. Someone who can subtly modulate what they say, creating light and shade to what could otherwise be rather uniform grey. Keep an ear open at the water-cooler and in the canteen line and you might well tune into that certain someone among your colleagues as they tell anecdotes and gags.

Podcasting is a very intimate medium. It’s downloaded to a personal device and then – usually – fed directly into the recipient’s ears. Get the feel right, and you can build an enthusiastic audience of thousands, one-by-one.

Which brings us neatly to knowing and getting your audience. Unlike most podcasts, there will be an element of obligation in consumption. A comms podcast isn’t a leisure activity. It’s there to get across news and concepts. The added dimension of the sheer, well, humanity of the human voice will clarify and reinforce your messages more than you can imagine.

The voice. It’s the ultimate font.

Podcasts: The adaptable medium

Today, you can use podcasts in all kinds of ways inside your organisation. For instance, you can use a one-off podcast to help announce a major change. That can give employees a chance to hear directly from senior leaders about what’s coming.

Or you might launch a regular magazine-style podcast that people subscribe to so it gets downloaded automatically to their computer, tablet or mobile as soon as it’s available. These regular shows can keep employees updated on all kinds of news and issues. It can work like a really good radio show – with a presenter and a range of guests. There’s scope for including the ideas and opinions of frontline staff from all levels. You can also set up hard-hitting interviews with senior leaders.

And these days, podcasts can also come with visuals – infographics, photos, even bullet points. By adding graphics to podcasts, you can reinforce important points and make messages memorable over the long term.

No wonder that, when it comes to Axiom’s armoury of communication solutions, in pod we trust.

For more, read about our approach to podcasts or else contact us to discuss the editorial and technical expertise we can supply to launch or enhance your podcasting future.

Axiom associate Mik Wilkojc is a double Sony Award-winning producer and editor of corporate audio programmes with a long pedigree in national broadcast radio, including 35 years at the BBC

Generali speaking, engagement starts with leaders

December 19, 2014

Top team at major insurer create their own development programme to build engagement capability

Leaders from Assicurazioni Generali SpA United Kingdom Branch (Generali UKB) are better able to influence their teams after learning to identify and respond to others’ habitual ways of behaving and communicating.

The 40 senior managers at the insurance firm honed their engagement skills in a workshop run by Axiom’s Miles Henson. The Knowing Me, Knowing You training is based on DISC, the behavioural and communication assessment tool that provides an insight into people’s personality traits and how they behave at work.

Before the event, participants completed a DISC self-assessment questionnaire and received a personalised evaluation of their natural communication style. On the day, they explored ways to adapt their style to meet the needs of others with different DISC profiles.

The workshop was just one element in an on-going package of support for Generali UKB that seeks to drive up employee engagement by first building leadership capability. In a kick-off workshop, we helped the organisation’s managers set their goals for business performance and employee engagement and then create their own bespoke engagement skills development programme that we would deliver. Knowing Me, Knowing You topped the wish-list.

In subsequent workshops, we helped leaders discover how to use storytelling techniques to engage employees and provided the leadership group with intensive training on the theory and practice of communicating change.

Rocco Romanelli, Head of Generali UKB, says: “Axiom has helped the company in understanding the meaning of employee engagement and therefore we are now much better equipped to motivate our people to execute the business strategy and deliver on our priorities.

“Axiom has challenged us to go further than I thought possible in a very short space of time.”

Our work with Generali UKB continues.

Full case study of Axiom’s work with Generali UKB

Our views on the essential communication skills for leaders and managers

Presenting with impact – a matter of life or death? How to be a better communicator V

September 22, 2014

Fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of death for many of us, at least if you believe surveys on this sort of thing

A bad presentation can indeed be the death knell of a project, promotion or even career. But it doesn’t have to be like that; you don’t have to die in a hail of bullet points.

In this blog, fifth in a series of six on the essential skills of employee engagement for leaders and managers, we explore some powerful if less well-known tips and techniques to help you present with impact – and avoid those near-death experiences.

Start with the end in mind

First things first. Resist the obvious temptation to dig out a set of slides you’ve used before, that you think “might just do the trick”. You can spend hours trawling through folders, files and back-up drives only to discover, when you eventually find the presentation, it wasn’t quite what you thought it was and isn’t fit for purpose.

Instead, invest time thinking through what you are trying to achieve – in other words, start with the end in mind. Do you want to sell a product or idea, inspire action or even promote yourself? Whatever your purpose is, write it down. That way, as you go along, you can check that everything you include is aligned to what you want to achieve.

Then ask yourself what would success look like both for you, the presenter, and for your audience. How would you feel? What would you do? How about the audience – what would they think and what would they feel as you finish? And, crucially, what action would they take? These are your outcomes. Again, write them down.

Know your audience

Next, what do you know about your audience? If the answer is not much, then do your research. What do they know about your topic already? What do they need to know? What might motivate them to take on your point of view? Are they detail people or big picture types? What is their attention span?

Finding out will help you identify the best angle of attack. I like to keep in mind the words of the late Stephen Covey: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” And as Ken Haemer of AT&T put it: “Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter ‘To whom it may concern’.”

It’s worth stressing here that all this initial work – on your purpose, outcomes and understanding audience needs – can go on in your head and on with good old-fashioned pen and paper. There’s no need to fire up PowerPoint just yet; otherwise, before you know it you’ll be churning out slides without knowing where you’re going.

Structure your story

With your audience’s needs and your aims clear and writ large in front of you, it’s time to start structuring your ideas. Even now, resist the temptation to go to PowerPoint – it tends to force you to think in terms of detail when you need to be thinking first about telling a coherent story. Storytelling is in our DNA and a good story is what captures the imagination and attention of an audience. It’s at the heart of presenting with impact.

To help you develop your plot, try breaking open some Post-It notes for an initial brainstorm. I often use Post-It notes on a big cleared table in a bright, naturally lit room and use them to write down the key points – between three and five – that I want to make, one per Post-It. I then arrange them across the top of the table to act as headings. Under each heading, I use more Post-Its, this time a different colour, for supporting points, quotes, references, links to resources, etc.

One of the great things about Post-Its is how they seem to aid flexible thinking. It’s much easier to move them around to find where they make most sense in the arc of my story. It’s also a lot easier to screw up a Post-It and bin it compared to deleting an animated ‘masterpiece’ of a slide that I’ve become married to (and wouldn’t want to divorce!) After all, it’s often what you leave out rather than what you put in that makes most difference to the success of a presentation.

In like a lion, out like a lamb won’t steal a march

The world knows that we Brits are fixated by the weather. We often describe the month of March as coming: “In like a lion, out like a lamb”. I see too many presentations around the world that are March-like. The presenter spends a good while thinking through how to make an impact at the beginning of a presentation – nothing wrong with that – but then no time at all thinking about how to end it – which, incidentally, is when the call to action normally comes!

These presentations don’t end; they peter out, dribbling apologetically down the shirt of the presenter. I think effective presentations need to come in like a lion and go out like a lion, too – and with a loud roar in the middle just as the audience might be losing concentration. This addresses the effect of primacy and recency; people remember the beginning of a presentation and they remember the end (even a poor one), but drift off in the middle.

Of course you also need light and shade in a presentation and clear contrast between the two; it can’t be all fireworks.

There are some superb pointers about contrast in presentations, as well as other great presentation tips and techniques, in Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate – better still, watch her presentation on how to structure presentations in which she walks the talk.

What’s the point of PowerPoint?

Even once you’re clear on the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘who’, pause before you give in to the lure of slides. Is a standard PowerPoint deck really the best way to get your message across? If you want to stand out from the noise of other communications, remember there is life beyond PowerPoint – and I don’t mean Keynote or Prezi (which makes my head spin when badly used).

You could write a report, followed up by a meeting. You could create a provocation paper, then facilitate a debate and reach a conclusion. You could take a symbolic action. You could mimic a famous song or movie to make your message memorable.

Hey, you could even try speaking ‘unplugged’ without any slides at all. TED is a great place to see outstanding presentations. Few speakers who give TED talks rely on visual aids – unless it’s to show powerful images, quotes or information that’s best presented graphically. (And the best speakers almost always tell a story, often with a strong personal thread.)

Whatever method you use to get your message across, your audience might really appreciate a break from the standard plod through a 40-slide PowerPoint deck – and admire you for your boldness and creativity.

Key points on PowerPoint

You might still end up using PowerPoint, of course. But it’ll be a well thought through choice of visual aid to support you in making your points powerfully not because of lazy thinking or a robotic auto response.

When you do go down the PowerPoint route, please keep these very personal bugbears in mind:

Make it easily legible to all. Twenty-point text is the bare minimum. If you’ve ever heard yourself saying: “You can’t read this at the back, but…”, then you were getting this one wrong. It’s a visual aid, not a sight test!
No more than five lines per page.
Avoid the ‘explosion in a font factory’ look.
Don’t use every animation or transition ‘trick’ on the software; this is a business presentation not a cheap wedding video.
No clipart, or pixelated images – they look unprofessional.
Don’t use your slides as a script – your audience can read, too (they probably even dressed themselves this morning!)

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse

Whichever technique you go for, the key is rehearsal – rehearse, rehearse, rehearse! In the mirror, with a colleague who’s opinion you value and, if you can, in the room you are going to present in. Don’t let the environment itself trip you up, literally, as you fall over laptop bags on your journey to the front… or can’t work the tech, or the daylight washes out the screen, etc. You can rehearse away all these concerns and sleep better the night before your presentation.

And rehearse your first few lines especially well. Deliver them clearly, with confidence and conviction, and you’ll get off to a great start, those butterflies will fly in formation and your nerves can flutter off.

I was working with a coaching client recently, who put it very clearly: “You are a life saver. Before the coaching, I would have struggled to even enter an auditorium without feeling physically sick. Now I’m confident about standing on stage and sharing my messages at the global road-shows.”

This is the call to action bit… (Note it comes towards the end!)

Delivering presentations doesn’t have to be scary. Try following these tips and you might just shock yourself with how good you can be – and leave your audience reflecting on the horror stories of other presentations they’ve endured while you make a positive impact.

If you think you or your colleagues would benefit from some tailored presentation coaching from Axiom or our High Impact presentation workshop that we can deliver inside your organisation, then contact us.

Listen to our podcast:

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Other posts in this series

Wellbeing: It’s all very well

May 5, 2014

Well-meant employee wellness initiatives won’t drive up engagement unless there’s a common sense of purpose in the organisation

“We need to to get line managers to take responsibility for employees’ wellbeing,” volunteered one participant at a recent Engage for Success (E4S) Guru Group meeting. “Agreed,” I said, perhaps a bit too sharply. “But let’s get real. My clients have a job just to get these same line managers to deliver the basics properly, such as proper performance management of their teams.”

So began a chain of events, one result of which is this blog post on wellbeing (which, ironically, I’ve been quite stressed about ever since!)

It was my first E4S meeting – around 30 employee engagement thinkers and practitioners from private and public sector organisations, academia and service providers. The subject up for debate was the link between wellbeing and engagement – one of the challenges being examined by the E4S Wellbeing sub-group.

So what was my special interest in all of this?

Number one, I’m fiercely passionate about helping the organisations we work with achieve their full potential by better engagement of their people.

Two – and being honest with myself – my enthusiasm for employee engagement, which has seen me growing Axiom for getting on for 20 years and flying around the world, often comes at the expense of my own work-life balance, probably even my own wellbeing. Hence the stress of finding time to write this blog!

The lively debate at the meeting offered me some useful insights in both areas.

Right away, it struck me that, while improved engagement can lead to improved wellbeing and vice versa, the link is not straightforward. As my own personal experience tells me, high levels of engagement do not always lead to similarly high levels of wellbeing. The reverse is also true; employees with a strong sense of wellbeing are not necessarily highly engaged. Take for example an organisation I’m familiar with which ticks every wellbeing initiative box, but has very low levels of engagement, advocacy or productivity.

For me, there are two key ways those of us who work in employee engagement can create the conditions for employees to experience both wellbeing and engagement.

Sense of purpose: a prerequisite

The first is to communicate the big picture for the organisation they work for; its purpose and how what they do, every day, contributes to success and their sense of accomplishment. Daniel Pink’s thesis on motivation, in particular the importance he places on purpose and autonomy, supports this.

Axiom has enjoyed great success over the years in helping organisations drive up employee engagement by painting the big picture for their people with a blend of visual metaphor and storytelling.

We use this approach to put in place the fundamentals of engagement: an understanding of where the organisation has come from, its heritage and recent successes, where it is now and the challenges it faces, where it wants to be in the future and how each function, team and individual can contribute to its success.

With that in place, we then work with clients to facilitate local action planning and – crucially – systematic performance management that recognises and rewards behaviours and achievements that help deliver on the company’s strategy.

It’s an approach that makes work meaningful – people across the organisation have a common purpose and a sense of their capacity to make a difference in their day-to-day work – and they have hard evidence that what they’re doing is noticed and appreciated.

Showing that you care

The second way we can contribute to wellbeing is to promote the initiatives that demonstrate that the organisation actually cares about its people, in pursuit of its strategy.

Research by Investors in People shows that over half of British workers feel their employer does not care about their health and wellbeing as long as they get the job done. Nearly half of this population say they feel less motivated as a result and 15% say they resent their employer.

And in a Hay Group survey, recently reported in HR Magazine, 82% of employees who said their employer demonstrated ‘care and concern’ for employees were rated as effective in their roles, compared to only 29% who felt their employer didn’t care.

Clearly, instilling a sense of purpose is only part of the solution.

Yes, employers can show they care through the classic wellbeing initiatives – anything from bike racks and fruit in meetings to health education and a confidential counselling service. But of course it goes much wider than that. It’s about the company investing in the development of employees. It’s about treating employees fairly through rewards and working conditions. It’s about promoting equality and diversity. It’s about providing recognition and reward for a job well done.

Instilling a sense of purpose and showing that you care: Taken together they would differentiate any employer and, as the recovery gathers pace and employees perceive they have more choice, help ensure that the business attracts and retains the best people.

As for me, I’m just privileged to have a job I really enjoy and to have the opportunity to make a difference to the engagement and wellbeing of so many people. Now I come to think about it, I don’t feel quite so tired now, even though it is 22:18 on a Friday night.

Oh yes, and another outcome of my first E4S meeting? I’m helping to set up a new group – on performance management.

In the meantime, I’m taking the weekend off!

Who should you invest in as your chief storytellers?

March 27, 2013

There’s Gold in them thar Bills

In these turbulent economic times, people are turning to a safe haven for their investments – gold. Turning to gold in your organisation is a great investment in getting your corporate stories told in a meaningful, authentic and inspirational way.

The precious resource I have in mind is not the shiny yellow metal, but a person called Gold, Bill Gold – or his equivalents in your organisation.

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