Thanks again to the Employee Engagement Alliance for another thought provoking session yesterday, followed by networking drinks.
The event started off with Seamour Rathore from Instinctif discussing how we should no longer rely on leaders for all the answers. We need to be involving employees to gain commitment and in particular we need to be involving the influencers. So people who might not necessarily agree with everything but they understand how the business works, who can get things done and understand how people are feeling. These people also might not be in your network of communication champions.
Catherine Fallon from Instinctif discussed the benefits of a ‘3-D corporate narrative’ which means involving your employees and using language that resonates with them. She discussed the importance of keeping your corporate narrative up to date and using it to describe who you are as an organisation – where you’ve been, where you are now and what your aspirations are. It should be open ended and compelling so that employees can write themselves in to the story and create an aspirational future. Your organisation should have a personality so that employees can relate to it, be inspired and excited by it.
Tara Madgwick from Low and Bonar discussed the work that they’ve done with Instinctif to bring their company together and find a core purpose and values that resonated with everyone. There were some insightful breakout sessions where people discussed how to sell the benefits of a 3D corporate narrative in to different stakeholder groups, which focused on co-creation, resulting in getting through the change curve quickly and optimising business performance… We were also wisely reminded of the fact that we now live in a society where everyone has a voice and can very easily share that voice.
The afternoon finished with an insightful session from Tanya Harris, the CEO of icom4, where she discussed the driving factors that impact on a company’s culture. These include the different style of team workers in an organisation: whether you generally: ‘Think’ ‘Feel’ ‘Plan’ or ‘Do’ and how you need all types of people in a team because everyone brings something to the table. She also mentioned how you shouldn’t always recruit in your own mould – your team members need to complement each other. When communicating Tanya reminded us that you need to communicate in different ways to appeal to all types of people – whether you like to listen, read, look at visuals, etc. people will have different needs and values.
Thank you again to the Employee Engagement Alliance for another great session and to all the speakers, and Instinctif for hosting. James Murphy from the EEA reminded us that the EEA awards for 2016 will open on 1 July – so watch this space.