strategy communication Archives - Axiom Communications Ltd

This change is everything

May 25, 2018

Five steps to effectively communicate and deliver change with your workforce

Businessman Dominoes | Axiom Communications It is often said, in today’s fast-moving world, that one of the few constants in life is change. In fact we’ve been saying that in business for years, so as leaders and communicators you’d hope that by now we’d be pretty good at communicating change. Yet the results of the vast majority of employee opinion surveys suggest otherwise. And in many of those surveys, those involved in leading and communicating change, come in for some very fierce criticism.

I appreciate that some of this negative feedback could stem from the fact that people don’t ‘like’ the change, but ever keen to own the outcome, I wonder if that is because we didn’t do a good job of communicating it in the first place?

So, what can be done to communicate and deliver change more effectively? To be clear about the new direction your business is heading, and take your employees with you on the journey… In this blog, I share five steps to speed you on your way.

Step 1. Show why ‘we can’t go on this way’

Other than paying lip service, for career progression or role retention reasons, no member of staff is going to genuinely give up their old ways of working, let alone adopt new ones, if they are not convinced by a compelling case for change in the first place. They need to be persuaded, using examples that are relevant to them and igniting a passion from within them, in terms of the things they care about. Let’s be honest, a trip through the balance sheet, delivered by the FD, rarely achieves this.

What does, are examples of how the change will positively impact customers, or service levels. Or showing the improvement the change will make in the working lives of the majority of staff. Also, perhaps, the difference the change will make to the environment and local communities. What you are seeking to create is a groundswell of opinion, coming from staff themselves, that we simply can’t go on like this – that we have to change.

Step 2. Celebrate the past – to create the foundations for the future

Despite the need for the change programme now being called for, most businesses – and indeed the people who work for them – are not total basket cases. They’ve delivered some great results over the years in some parts of the business, and are rightly proud of their achievements. Actively celebrating these successes, especially in the context of delivering earlier change programmes, if carefully positioned, can have a number of benefits.

You can show that the business has successfully delivered change in the past, and can do so again. You can celebrate the successes of the past and the contributions of those involved, as part of the rich history of your business, but then leave them behind – in the past – and move on. This technique is especially important in helping people let go of the old ways of working. And you can build the pride and confidence in the workforce, and use that as a springboard to deliver even greater things in the future.

Step 3. Establish the credibility of your planned changes

So often I hear staff referring to latest wave of change as ‘another crazy idea, cooked up by people in HQ that have never spent a day working in the operation.’ Shifting that perception is key if your change programme is to achieve its full potential – through the actions of your own better aligned and engaged workforce.

Perhaps equally important is ensuring that the change you are creating is not in fact ‘a crazy idea, cooked up by…’ And you can kill the two birds with one stone by getting people from the coal face involved in shaping and championing your change programme. I find their insights often add immense value, and their involvement and advocacy carry great weight with the people you need to influence – the workforce who will implement your changes.

Step 4. Communicate your collective ambition

With your colleagues now telling each other ‘we can’t go on like this.’; with the foundations for success firmly established and the past left behind; and, with the trust in your proposed changes growing by the day – through steps one to three – now is the time focus everyone’s efforts on delivering the changes you want to see.

That means communicating your collective ambition, the things you are all working together to achieve, your North Star if you will. And not using ‘strategic’ language that only appeals to the members of the board or the writers of a thesaurus. Instead, use plain English, short sentences and even shorter words, especially if you are an organisation where English isn’t always the mother tongue. And bring your collective ambition to life in every part of your business; using stories, case studies, blogs, videos, podcasts – ideally featuring the voices of employees from beyond the Leadership Team.

Step 5. Promote the early wins

Having got the change ball rolling, you now need to build some momentum. That means communicating meaningful, often highly symbolic, early wins. For maximum effect these need to be wins that really resonate with the workforce, again ideally about things they really care about. And again, why not feature their faces, voices and stories.

Get them talking about the difference the change is already making to their lives – and those of the customers and stakeholders they serve. Bring out the human element of the change, not just the process. Processes and procedures rarely stir the soul, but people and how they are experiencing the change does. Critically, don’t forget to highlight the behaviours that made your early wins possible. Promote the right behaviours, and the next wave of wins will surely follow, as the change programme gathers pace.

As the saying goes, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. Well, I’ve given you five here. If this change is everything – to the success of your organisation – then you need your people to be saying ‘this changes everything.’

Follow these steps and they might just say that, and actually deliver the changes you are looking for!

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.

Trade secret: In search of gold

February 22, 2018

Harness the power of your informal influencers

In all organisations, you’ll find informal influencers whose voice carries further than the organisational chart would ever suggest.

Partnering with these people can help your messages become more real, more relevant and indeed increase their reach. So how do you recognise them? They are often the ones who ‘hold court’ in meetings, are popular lunch partners and have huge networks. The first one I ever met was called Mr. Gold and with his help we created the Gold standard in communications.

Inspire your people to new heights

Trade secret: Ready, aim, fire

November 28, 2017

Use these three steps to communicate your change strategy

Before you get all creative with a magical metaphor to communicate your strategy or other major change, think about the three basic steps of ready, aim, fire.

First, prepare the messages you want to get across (ready). Then decide to whom you need to communicate (aim). Only then should you put your methods into practice, and communicate (fire). Fire, ready, aim rarely works, any more than ready… ready… ready…!

Read more about communication change and strategy.

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?

How to deliver better performance through enhanced employee engagement

March 29, 2016

Got a business challenge that is keeping you awake at night? Keen to exploit an opportunity before the competition does?

In this blog, Axiom founder Chris Carey explores how to harness the insights and expertise of your very own staff to help you rise to the challenge

Better performance through enhanced employee engagement

I’ve been working in the employee engagement space for 25 years now and many are the times I’ve heard a leader say ‘I know what the problem is – I just don’t know where to start in terms of trying to solve it.’ My response is clear. ‘You already have the answer – you start with the problem – and then engage with your workforce to determine the best way forward to resolve it.’

In truth, leaders aren’t the only ones who know something isn’t as good as it could be. Your people have worked that out too. They might have lost sleep about it as well and the odds are they’ve been talking to each other about how to rise to the challenge. But their passion for excellence and innovation in execution often go unheard by leaders, which actually drives disengagement.

Experience tells me that bosses and the people they lead already share a common goal, for example, to deliver an outstanding customer experience, and between them, they have the insights, experience and expertise to co-create the best possible ways forward.

And what’s more, staff invariably want to contribute; to be heard, valued and recognised, so it seems involving them is a good way forward. In fact, they want to be engaged.

Employee engagement defined and quantified

My favourite definition of employee engagement is “being positively present during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others”. It’s characterised by feeling positive about a job, working hard to do the job well and feeling loyalty towards colleagues and to the organisation itself.

And so much research shows that engagement delivers better performance. As just one example, the Institute for Employment Studies reports that engaged employees deliver four times more value to an organisation than those who are disengaged. That’s incredibly significant for any organisation, right?

Engaged employees go the extra mile – even when times are tough. Indeed our own research shows the efficacy of engagement, for example in communicating business strategy.

Five steps to success

Having acknowledged that leaders are often pushing against an open door in terms of engaging with colleagues to deliver on a common goal, it’s worth exploring five steps to success that have stood the test of time in many sectors and even more organisations.

Understand your people

The better you understand the people you are engaging with, the more likely you are to be able to shape your messages and engage those concerned in what you are all trying to achieve. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask: What do they want or need to know? Why do they want to know it? What do they already know? What might motivate or engage them? What won’t work? And if you don’t know – ask them.

Identify and define your messages

Decide what you want people to think, feel and do differently. Make that the basis of your key messages. In particular, remember the importance of the ‘why’ and ‘so what?’ in engagement. Your messages must answer employees’ fundamental questions: What’s in it for me? Why is this good for my stakeholders / customers? Aim for between three and five key messages; any more, and people will struggle to see the wood for the trees.

Enlist and upskill line managers

Time and again, employees say that their line manager is their communication channel of choice, especially in times of change. The extent of their engagement depends on line managers. You need to upskill your managers so they can communicate with verve (especially face to face) and act as positive role models who truly own the messages they are delivering.

Develop powerful interventions

Now (and only now) it is time to start developing a clear plan for how you will make use of a range of communication activities or solutions. These can range from conferences and events to employee magazines and from apps to internal social media and podcasts. The key thing is to create solutions that seize people’s attention, get them involved and encourage them to think and act differently.

One of the best ways of doing this is by exploiting the power of images and storytelling to make a strategy or change convincing and meaningful. They act as catalysts for discussions in which senior leadership and local work teams identify and explore what they need to do to contribute and commit to action.

Check you’re getting through

It’s all very well delivering shiny new communications solutions, but are they making a difference? Are you getting the results you’re looking for, or just moving a lot of hot air? You need to measure whether messages have been received, believed and understood and, ultimately, acted on. If not, you need to do something different.

Be positively infectious

And once you’ve got the evidence that your engagement is working, don’t keep it a secret. Share it, publicise it, promote it.

Effective employee engagement is positively infectious, disengagement is infectious too and potentially more virulent. Make sure yours is the right kind of ‘catchy’ and you can deliver better performance in your organisation – you might even get a bit more sleep.

For more useful articles and tools to help drive your employee engagement check out:

How to Engage your Staff at Each Stage of the Employee Lifecycle

Engage the app if you really want to know the difference your internal communication is making

Fire your middle managers with enthusiasm – at live events

July 2, 2015

Five tips for designing and delivering conferences that move middle management minds

I’ve always been struck by the gulf between the aspirations of senior leaders, as discussed in the boardroom, and the concrete reality of what people really think, say and do, day in and day out, on the factory, office or shop floor. Indeed, that’s what got me involved in employee engagement in the first place, over 25 years ago.

In internal communications, as on the tube in London, the cry is often the same: “Mind the gap”. And who is sitting right in the middle of this gap in most organisations? More often than not, it’s your middle and line managers. To get your workforce engaged in delivering the strategy that’s been drawn up (or at least agreed) at the boardoom table, you need to fire your middle managers with enthusiasm.

Despite advances in new digital channels, direct communication from middle and line managers is still the most influential channel for the people they lead. People pay real attention to what their immediate boss says and does, so you need to get those bosses saying and doing the right things – acting as role models not ‘well poisoners’ or ‘energy thieves’. Get your line managers to act as advocates for your strategy and, through their actions, you can inspire the entire workforce. But fail to get them onside and they will do a lot of damage, passively or otherwise.

One of the best forums to connect with and win over middle managers is at conferences and other live events. Here are five tips for doing just that.

1. Create compelling messages

To begin with, you need a set of clear, concise and compelling messages that you want the entire organisation to understand and act on. That will give you a consistent foundation upon which line managers can add their local information. We often describe it as one company song for which there can be a number of arrangements depending on the needs of discrete audiences.

So start as you mean to go on and get some of the event participants co-creating these messages with you; messages for the business, by the business. As McKinsey put forward, messages are more powerful when they come from a ‘bloke like me’.

2. Make it interactive

We use the word ‘participant’ deliberately. You don’t want ‘attendees’ or ‘delegates’ at your event, you want participants; you want your line managers interacting with your strategy and plans, being inspired by them, owning them and ultimately of course being advocates for them.

And you won’t achieve any of that if your conferences are a seemingly endless sequence of PowerPoint presentations during which the audience dies in a hail of bullet points. Genuine interactivity is key to the success of a leadership event.

3. Secure commitment to action

We urge you to share your vision for the future of your organisation, then give your audience a chance to check their understanding of it through carefully facilitated interactivity. You want to know what they liked about what they just heard, what was inspiring, what questions they have about making it happen and what might be challenging.

Then get participants truly collaborating to create pragmatic ways forward to overcome the challenges and help execute the strategy and plans in their part of the organisation. Get them thinking about the behaviours they’ll need to exhibit to model the way forward with their teams – and identify the behaviours that won’t work and need to be consigned to history.

4. Use the latest tech

All of the above can be a lot to cover in one event – and that’s where we often supplement traditional facilitation techniques with the latest audience interaction technology.

Using it we can quickly get instant feedback from the audience, capture their comments, anonymously if that helps, log and respond to their questions, prioritise ideas, even measure the success of the event – all live.

It’s amazing how much you can accomplish using the collaborative tools. And participants love it, modern tech for a modern, forward-thinking employer.

And post-event we can email individual actions plans and notes, created at the event, back to participants and send a ‘digital copy’ of the entire event to leaders as a Word doc or spreadsheet. Oh, and no one has to type up any flipcharts!

5. Help managers bring the baton home

As your event comes to a close, and while your line managers are all fired up, give them some engagement skills development and get them practising how to share the buzz of event with their teams back in the workplace.

We think the success of any leadership event should be felt months after it has ended – by people who didn’t even attend, the people your line managers need to inspire, the people who will ultimately deliver your strategies and plans. The conference presentations may have finished, but the task of inspiring the entire workforce has just begun.

For us, that often means co-creating ‘cascade packs’ that will help line managers thrive in their role of bringing your messages to life in their part of the organisation. Stapled copies of some slides just don’t cut it these days!

Indeed, you should be super clear at the outset about the role of participants in cascading messages from the events. Maybe even share how you are going to measure the success of the cascade – that often gets people sitting up straight and licking the end of their pencils from the word go!

As facilitator, I often ask which part of their salary participants want to give back if they don’t think that inspiring their direct reports is part of their job! Their role, like yours as communicators and leaders, is to close the gap between rhetoric and day-to-day reality.

So do use your conferences and events to fire your middle and line managers with enthusiasm. And if the well poisioners really don’t want to get on board, maybe in some cases you might need to fire them full stop (whether you do it with enthusiasm is up to you – but of course you must always do it with the full support of your HR team!)

Axiom’s approach to designing and delivering great live events

If you liked this blog then check out the rest in the series:

How to track the impact of conferences and events

Predicting the future of conferences and events

How to track the impact of conferences and events

May 15, 2015

Do your events measure up? Expert facilitator and audience interaction tech guru Chris Elmitt on the latest ways of finding out

At the most recent PR Week internal comms shindig, there was a lot of talk about the measurable value of video. Because it’s now so easy to track views, comments and likes when a video gets published on the intranet, it’s an attractive channel for those under pressure (rightly so) to demonstrate the impact of their comms tactics.

Yet most of us instinctively know that face-to-face events are a more powerful intervention. What if we could find ways to more reliably measure the impact of events? Surely this would help us restore face-to-face in its true place as the channel of choice. [Read more…]

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…]

Put the future first in employee engagement

January 27, 2015

Forecasting the changing business landscape can help engage employees in creating future success

By Axiom associate and futurologist Chris Middleton

“The fact is, the future is unknowable. So why bother trying to predict it?“

I’ve heard variations of this view expressed across my career. Most often it’s trotted out in companies that fear change, don’t change and are likely headed to the wall. Once upon a time, Kodak was the biggest name in consumer photography. But it failed to anticipate the rise of digital photography and then of smartphone cameras and ended up bankrupt. (Only in the past couple of years has it started a comeback of sorts – including recently by out-licensing the Kodak brand for a new line of Android tablets and smartphones).

The more enlightened approach, the one challenger brands take, is to say: “The world will continue to change around us and we need to be ready. We need to prepare today in order to survive tomorrow.”

This is where I come in. I help companies seize tomorrow’s opportunities today by working alongside them to co-create the future. It’s about building the best possible assumption base about the world to come, and then analysing the opportunities and threats that this ‘likely’ world represents.

This enables management teams to put their arms around the future and anticipate, then intercept, the evolving business landscape. For instance, work with Tesco a decade ago pointed up its corporate vulnerability as sector big boys, highlighted shoppers’ move back to the high street and anticipated that superstores were likely too big and too remote in a world of emerging authenticity and rising fuel prices. As the world has unfolded since this futuring study, Tesco has indeed been pummelled by ‘Tescopoly’ accusations. In response to the high-street opportunity, it has opened 1,600 Tesco Express convenience stores in Britain. And it is now facing up to its over-spaced Extra stores that are no longer fit for purpose.

Another example: Work with Michelin a few years back highlighted the potential for peer-to-peer car share. Subsequently, we’ve seen the emergence of blablacar, liftshare and catcharide.

But there are still organisations that seemingly turn their backs on the future and so miss out on seeing how developments in their industry will play out and impact their brands and performance. All too often, they go into denial about the challenges of the future because meeting them inevitably demands change – and change can be scary and threatening.

This is where Axiom can come in; through employee engagement that addresses the fear of change and gets people excited about the future.

Future-gazing and employee engagement

One of the most important ways of driving employee engagement is to instil confidence in the vision and direction of the company. In doing so, you reassure staff about the future, earn their buy-in and drive co-ordinated frontline effort to make the vision a reality. This is where future-gazing and employee engagement can come together.

Global real estate player Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) lacked differentiation versus its competitors and wanted to set itself apart by delivering thought leadership. Providing inspired insights about the future of retailing to its retail clients would drive client meetings and generate more strategic dialogues.

I carried out a Retail 2020 analysis that anticipated the move to omni-channel models, forecasted the end of ‘silent retailing’ and indicated how far retailers would go in communicating directly with customers using mobile apps. The study anchored the new JLL strategy, and its insights were cascaded to the company’s 2,000 employees through a wide-ranging employee communication programme. This ensured that staff understood and bought into the predictions, believed in the vision and started talking the right language with each other and with JLL’s clients.

Subsequently, JLL was able to secure access to the boardrooms of 50 key clients and demonstrate the leap forward it had made in understanding the industry and anticipating the future of retailing.

Axiom wants to encourage companies to be future-facing so they can shape employee engagement in the context of the world to come. Applying a robust methodology to anticipate the trends in the marketplace not only enables a future-proofed strategy, it also paves the way for more effective change and employee engagement.

Axiom associate Chris Middleton is a trends expert who inspires brands to rejuvenate and profit from opportunities. Away from his work with Axiom, Chris operates independently under the banner of futurescoaching