Category: Blog

IBM recently asked their staff, and those of their major clients, to pitch ideas via a secure website about what the company should be doing. Within three days they had 37,000 responses.

This mass focus group of employees was all about active participation (and involving their major clients – who provide a very good steer on what customers want from IBM – was a great idea). It’s testament to the fact that employees and customers have an enormous collective wisdom and experience which is far far greater than that of any single management team.

We have long believed that collaboration, brainstorming, participation, group discussions and dialogue not only empowers and engages employees, but creates a massive energy within the organisation which, managed and channelled carefully can result in innovation, knowledge-sharing, learning, engagement and ultimately better performance. Of course we add storytelling to the mix, but a major part of our programme – and the bit that starts to generate real value – comes when teams gather together to discuss the different strategic priorities in the company’s story, the role they’ll play, and the action they need to take.

IBM is serious about this approach. In Trevor Davis and Ian Bradbury’s essay in this month’s Management Today (IBM Global Business Services), they talk about the importance of “adopting a collaborative, collegiate and team-oriented approach that still leaves room for rewarding individual contributions to innovation”. And their final message rings clearly: “It’s tempting to think that innovation is someone else’s job, perhaps a task belonging to the R&D team or the marketing department. In IBM, we believe that although innovation needs orchestration from the top, everyone should be encouraged to think broadly, act personally, and contribute to the innovation mix.”

Visions of an Alpine mountaintop with happy and care-free managers flinging their arms into the air as they twirl around with members of their teams are dispelled as reality hits….

It’s that thorny old issue of making middle managers better communicators. Or communicators at all.

Well, we’d all be very wealthy if we could solve that particular conundrum in one fell swoop wouldn’t we? But it is without doubt one of the most common question asked these days and one of the biggest headaches for those responsible for employee communications.

It’s not that there are some excellent communicators out there….confident, bright people who genuinely care about their team’s performance, understand the messages they need to get through to them and spend the time and effort ensuring that those messages get through.

But equally there are many, many managers who just can’t, don’t or won’t do it. Quite often it’s because those very people find it hard to understand the strategy of the organisation themselves, and even if they do, how it relates to their particular function or team. They’re too busy to spend yet more time conjuring up another eighty PowerPoint slides to add their perspective to a strategic message which is already burgeoning with complexity. Or they’re cynical about the strategy in the first place with no sense of alignment. Or their personal agenda has got in the way. Or they don’t see it as their responsibility. Or their leader hasn’t got the message through effectively him or herself. Or they aren’t confident about standing up in front of a group and presenting. Reason after reason…. but the effect of NOT communicating effectively at the coalface can be disastrous in terms of performance.

New research shows that one in three people at ground level are not consulted or asked for advice by their manager, as if asking for advice amongst lower ranking employees is just not the done thing. Well consulting is one thing, but even the most basic strategic communication has to be a top priority.

The truth is that there’s no silver bullet. We are acutely aware of this issue as we help leaders drive strategic messages through the organisation, and have come up with a raft of approaches to make it as easy as possible as the messages hit the strata between leaders and employees at ground level, from including a cross-section of would-be ambassadors in leadership meetings, to ‘discovering’ the messages collectively (and so avoid a situation where a manager has to ‘present’ the strategy), to presentation coaching and on-line tutorials….the list goes on. But the key to all of this is to keep it simple. Simplify the top line Story so that managers aren’t afraid of presenting it, and give them simple but clear and useful tools to help them do it. Get them to add their personal stories as part of that cascade so they can take ownership of it, and allow flexibility and fluidity to enable them to interpret the Story and build an action plan in a way that’s relevant to their teams.

So back to that mountaintop. The good news is that the mountain can be climbed, streams forded and rainbows followed. And solving the middle management comms issue story is one that we tell quite well here at Percy St…

Storytelling doesn’t just help people understand and remember information – it acts as a powerful unifier.

In business we are often faced with the challenge of communicating and engaging people from across many different disciplines in corporate strategy and vision. Companies are made up of hundreds of different departments, functions, business units, skills and disciplines, but the end user is the same – the customer. Yet it is often difficult to get different people to share the same vision, understanding how their individual contribution fits with those of their colleagues who may work in a completely different part of the business.

According to Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein (‘Better Together: Restoring The American Community’) storytelling can play a powerful role here, because it helps people achieve a common understanding. Mark Dominiak from Insight Garden sums it up beautifully:

‘Even if backgrounds, viewpoints or agendas differ, the neurology and ‘language’ (for lack of a better word) of storytelling help people find common ground. Through stories, people can reconstruct perceptions of others and points of view perhaps much better than they would via straightforward rationale.

Whenever people try to convince others of their point of view, discussions become competitive. They concern what people want, not who people really are. When storytelling is used as a catalyst in interactions, people learn more about each other; from the roles others have in stories to the emotions and resolutions of situations contained therein.

When people are able to better understand the people behind points of view, they are more likely to give attentive thought to that point of view. Further, when people have better understanding of others as individuals, they are more likely to treat those people with respect and compassion. Interactions stop being competitive and become cooperative.”

In essence, storytelling leads to competitive discussions which lead to problem-solving ideas. Which in turn helps others to learn about their colleagues, their desires and frustrations, not to mention pride, energy and greater productivity on all fronts.

Tucked into the Tate Modern’s fifth floor collections is a video installation by Gary Hill (1951) called Remarks on Color (1994). The piece depicts Hill’s young daughter Anastasia reading from the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book of the same name.

Hill asked Anastasia to read the text aloud without stopping, regardless of whether she understood the concepts or was familiar with the words. Often her pronunciation and inflection render the difficult work absurd. The piece is both surprisingly hypnotic and spookily reminiscent of what goes on inside organisations when supervisors and employees try to convey words provided to them by senior management or the corporate communication function. Quick, grab the Crayolas and let’s try again.

I went to see a company the other day where the head of employee engagement completely baffled me.

It became clear after five minutes of talking to him that he saw employee engagement as an activity. Meaning internal comms – newsletters, intranet, briefings, e-mails, conference planning etc etc. Well, he was head of employee engagement so employee engagement was what he did as a job. It was his function. Engaging employees.

Employee engagement is NOT just an activity within one department, I argued. Employee engagement must be seen as an OUTCOME which comes as a result of many different factors in an organisation. Pay, reward, communication, management style, leadership, training and development, the brand – the list goes on and on. And of course culture plays a major part – nurturing a culture of involvement, contribution, making things simple, empowering people, dialogue, encouraging feedback, knowledge-sharing and so on is critical.

And yet more and more organisations are creating titles and departments which carry the responsibility of employee engagement, as if it’s down to a small group of people to make sure it happens. And those people are becoming more and more confused by the plethora of contractors ranging from events companies to artists, branding companies and PR agencies who are all jumping on the employee engagement bandwagon. I seem to remember the same thing happening with the phrase Brand Experience, but that’s another story for another day….

The real responsibility for the engagement of employees of course lies with the Chief Executive. That’s where the buck stops. And below him or her every leader and manager has a responsibility to their teams to ensure that employees are getting the most out of the company – because then they’ll give it back in spades. The remit for ensuring that the right disciplines and interventions are in place usually falls to HR / Communications (oops, sorry, and maybe the Employee Engagement Department) which is fine, but it’s a collective responsibility which needs to be recognised and embedded firmly throughout every pocket of the organisation.

Interesting that this chap I was talking to came from one of the biggest management consultancy firms in the world.

Great to see that JetBlue’s new advertising campaign is one of storytelling….

Much of our work focuses on the need to improve customer service as a key driver for increased revenue and greater profitability. In a recent customer service poll of six European countries, we Brits came second. Amongst the least helpful and most surly are the French. Germans top the poll for efficiency, knowledge and customer service. And queuing.

Having said that, Britain came bottom at customer service in fast food outlets which suffered from ‘clutter, untidiness and unhelpful staff’, but top in financial services. Nowadays customers are much more savvy and discerning, and often go to retailers knowing more about the product they want to buy than the shop staff themselves. It’s a no-brainer, then, that better customer service / attitude and product awareness can make a massive difference to the bottom line. Just think for a minute about the level of customer service you get in the US and compare it to Europe.

And how do you get there? For a start, getting employees to focus on such aspects as service, innovation, change, value and efficiency and help them to think about what they are currently doing and how they could be doing it better. Turn this into a language that everyone can understand, and tell a few memorable stories that inspire people, and it’ll happen. Maybe not overnight, but you can see some pretty spectacular results in a very short space of time. We’ve got the answer, you see. You have my number.

This article on engaging a virtual workforce is interesting. We read an impressive – and increasing – amount of material from India on the subject of employee engagement. With the rapid growth that countries such as India and China are experiencing, it’s not surprising that the subject of employee engagement is taken seriously. We might take a leaf out of their book…..

Steve Adubato has some good things to say about storytelling in business.

It has recently been brought to my attention that despite our best efforts to prove this approach really does break down barriers commonly found in corporate and internal communications (just call us for the proof), there are still some sceptics out there – people who believe storytelling to be a pink and fluffy HR thing. I don’t know – perhaps there really are people out there who go back to their families at the end of a hard day at work and tell them all about it with the help of a flip-chart (!). I’m always available to argue the case. No, seriously, have a read – it all makes sense to me….