As this weeks scoop is ‘celebrating uniqueness always’ I could not keep away and had to join the rest of the scoopers in exploring this Bridge value further. This value can go in many directions as it sits with each individual to best understand and activate what they view (and celebrate) as unique. We often use words such as ‘authentic’ and ‘individual’, but I believe this value goes beyond these words alone.
Part of the secret lies in the word ‘always’. To me this is at the core of all values. In business, we often showcase our values on walls and websites without considering the significance of these powerful instruments of direction and guidance. True values should not be something that we choose when it suits or because it is the fashionable word of the time. When it comes to celebrating uniqueness I believe that this is the foundation of Bridge as a people learning solutions agency. It all starts with being fascinated by people and there is nothing more unique than each and every one of us.
When I was in my early 20s, I found a great coffee table book dedicated to workers around the world. The photographer who created this amazing pictorial travelled the globe snapping ordinary people doing their daily jobs. In doing so, he created a timeless memoriam of just how unique we are. As individuals, and in our connection to the tasks that dominate our roles as workers and customers. We all play our unique part in the greater network; the interwoven global economy.
Barclays Digital Eagles are employees with a passion for online and social media who volunteer their time to explain technology to their colleagues and to the public.
Barclays Eagle Labs provides maker space facilities, office and desk rental as well as business incubation for start-ups and high growth entrepreneurs. Dave Shepherd looks after 17,000 Digital Eagles in the UK and has operational and implementation responsibility for the delivery of the Barclays Eagles Labs programme nationally.
There are currently 3 Labs situated in Bournemouth, Cambridge and Brighton with Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Oxford and Reading coming in the next few months.
How do you encourage your people to share their knowledge across your organisation?
Sharing together and collaborating together in an environment that is inclusive (and exclusive) is vital. My goal at Barclays when we developed the Digital Eagles to teach each other to “become the most digitally savvy workforce in UK Retail,” was to make it a really exclusive club, that anyone could join.
How does Barclays embrace the use of knowledge sharing technology?
We have a dedicated colleague app. It is a secure container that allows colleagues to use their own phone to receive news updates, app demos, podcasts and video streams.
What would be the one piece of advice you would give to a new leader on sharing knowledge openly?
At Barclays and with our Digital Eagles initiative, in particular, my biggest learning was the “How” you do things is just as important (and some cases more important) than the “What” you do.
Hear more from Dave as he presents on the topic ‘Connecting Culture and Vision Through Creative Thinking’ at BridgeCon 2017 on 31 January.
Ella’s Kitchen makes 100% organic baby and toddler food, sold in supermarkets internationally including UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada and the United States.
Their mission is to improve children’s lives through developing healthy relationships with food. They recently achieved 26th place in the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Places to work (Small Company category).
How do you stay motivated in such a dynamic organisation?
It’s easy to stay motivated in such a dynamic organisation – I would be bored in a slow paced environment! The passion, pace and people at Ella’s make this a really motivating place to be. ‘We Want to Win’ is one of our values and this really lives and breathes here – in my role I am constantly challenging myself and my team to make Ella’s an even better place to work. This year we have done lots of new things that have motivated me like launching volunteering days for Ella’s team, introducing a Thinking Differently programme (We Think Differently is another one of our values), getting into the Best Companies best 100 – the list goes on! The major driver for me is contributing to a Values led, purpose driven organisation that is truly making a difference to developing children’s healthy relationships with food.
What are your challenges in managing people?
I want to carry on improving Ella’s as a place to work. This means I am very ambitious for what myself and my team achieve and I rely on my team to feedback when ideas or timelines are a little too ambitious!
What would be the one piece of advice you would give to a new leader on engaging their employees?
Really get to know your employees as individuals. It’s the only way to find out what motivates them and how to personally engage them.
Catherine will be one of our panellists discussing, ‘Let’s build great places to work’ at BridgeCon2017
By Catherine Allen, Head of Keeping People Happy, Ella’s Kitchen
Ella’s has delivered double-digit growth every year for the last 10 years, achieves a partners score of over 90% and has the highest consumer loyalty in the category. Our employee net promoter score is improving with the last survey coming in at 68%.
Last year we entered the Best Companies awards coming 25th and certified as a B Corp.
I am convinced that the happiness of our team influences our commercial success. There’s no magic formula to creating a great place to work. But I do have 3 top tips that have worked well at Ella’s.
Give your team a reason to feel engaged and proud. We keep the team close to our mission to ‘Improve children’s lives through developing healthy relationships with food’. A great example of this is employees helping on Ella’s funded school trips to a local farm and market garden. We also have clear and simple values which live and breathe in everything we do at Ella’s.
Have great leaders and managers. As all HR professionals know, our efforts are useless if leaders and managers are misaligned with the mission and values, or are poor people managers. ‘My manager’ is the most common reason people leave companies, so we help leaders and managers to role model the values via a bespoke management programme and invite 360 feedback on how well they live and encourage the values.
Treat people as individuals. I know this seems easy in a smaller team like Ella’s, but all companies should beware of broad brush initiatives which assume everyone in a demographic group (eg mothers!) has identical needs. Our 2 surveys a year and our Show and Tell (employee forum) help us in understanding the team better, but last year we were early adopters of the Open Blend Method – a tech based coaching approach focused on open communication with leaders. Through leaders understanding their team members better, we’ve seen a measurable increase in the happiness of individuals.
By Charley Maher, Managing Director, Bristol Wessex Billing Services
I created a vision for ‘Health & Wellbeing’ for my business a year ago and since then, my team have exceeded my expectations in terms of what we have achieved.
BWBSL is jointly owned by Wessex Water and Bristol Water and are responsible for the customer journey for their 1.5 m customers across the South West. Their customers rely on BWBSL to provide them with an efficient and helpful service.
I knew that people were core to the success of the business and wanted to ensure that my team of 380 people were not only focused on providing an excellent service experience to customers but I also wanted to create initiatives to support a healthy and happy team to enable brilliant employee engagement.
Our health and wellbeing initiatives over the last year have touched everyone across the business. Each month is themed and a key objective for the H&W charter is to ensure that my entire team are happy and healthy at work. Mental health is high on my agenda too. Interestingly, I was really pleased to read that ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’ in 2016 focused on highlighting the impact of relationships on our mental health. The charity has asked people to commit to maintaining good relationships with friends, family and colleagues, which they believe is fundamental to our health and happiness.
We took this objective to a different level at BWBSL and set about creating stronger relationships in the workplace both within teams and cross-functionally. New working groups and project teams were set up to pilot and launch the monthly health and wellbeing initiatives and in our recent employee engagement survey, there was overwhelming feedback from team members talking about improved relationships at work and how well team members support and help each other more than ever. I also asked my learning and development team to design and launch a mental health awareness training programme, making it available to all team members. This has received great feedback and increased levels of empathy demonstrated across the business.
The last year has been full of great achievements, in 2015 the business won ‘Best Place to Work’ at the UK Customer Experience Awards and earlier this year we were recognised with a total of four awards at the UK Employee Experience Awards, however, a happy and healthy, engaged team is by far the best achievement of all.
By David D’Souza, Head of Engagement, London, CIPD
If you were unlucky enough to have my company over a drink in the run up to Christmas you would be assailed/assaulted by my views on why ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is one of the greatest films ever. More specifically you would have had to put up with me talking about the character of George Bailey and how perfectly he is played by Jimmy Stewart.
Jimmy Stewart had an incredible career that included a number of exceptional films including Rope, Rear Window and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Throughout them he embodies a charisma, charm and vulnerability that draws audiences and people to him. The character of George Bailey sees Stewart embody a sense of goodness, purpose, ethical commitment and humanity that is a lesson to any aspiring leader.
In a couple of interviews from 1973 Stewart talked about acting in a way that that I think applies wonderfully well to leadership.
Stewart described the art of acting as ‘the opportunity to create moments’ that had real resonance. Moments that stick with people for years and have a profound positive impact. He talked about the fact that people didn’t necessarily recall the titles of his films or the plots, but would often tell him that they had seen a film years ago and one scene had remained with them. His duty and role was simply to ‘prepare yourself as best as you can to make these moments happen’. They didn’t always happen, but when they did they mattered.
‘To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for 20 years, that was very special to me’. The role of a visionary leader is to draw people to them through engaging their heads and hearts. The very best leaders create environments that are memorable for the strength of culture and sense of purpose. They paint a possible future that people want to step towards and they understand that isn’t just a process, but an involving journey.
Stewart described a director asking for the same scene to be reshot 30 times. The actors eventually asked the director what was wrong. The director replied ‘You are perfect, but I’m just waiting for something to happen.’. It’s the same with leadership, it isn’t about the process – it is about the impact. The deep impact that you can have on another person, the kind of thing that resonates through the years. They don’t happen all the time and you need to respect and understand that. Good leaders just make these moments happen more often – and part of that is by embodying a movement towards a compelling vision.
When asked why characters he played were so timeless Stewart gave a lovely summary of what we might now term ‘authentic leadership’.
‘I’m a pretty good example of human frailty, I don’t really have all the answers, I have very few of the answers, but for some reason I make it. We get across that river’. Whatever the vision is, the best leaders help their people get across that river.
A final thought:
When Stewart started his career employees really were treated as assets. He was traded by his studio to another for 7 stunt horses.
Karen Ward, Founder and Research Director of Aditi Unlimited, joined BridgeTalks on 5 July 2016 to talk on ‘Brand Personality, Promise and Your People’. Karen has worked extensively across all sectors on the issue of organisational effectiveness, particularly developing sustainable strategic capability.
The talk was opened by Dale Smith, Director of Creation at Bridge Training & Events. Dale introduced the topic with some of his own experience drawing on his university days and posing the question ‘What is Personality?’. Dale then took the audience through the origins of the word and all the parts that showcase ‘the mask’ that you present to the world; your personality.
Karen began by talking about the difference in brand thinking between public and private sectors, and then continued the theme of experiences coming out of university and her first role in Nigeria as a Sales and Marketing Manager. She talked about the difference between strategy, theory and application – stressing the need for practical application.
Karen then took the audience through an example where companies with the same product delivered a different brand promise; the different underground networks of Hong Kong, New York and London. She talked about the re-framing of the Hong Kong network from delivering a service to creating a greater customer experience when people arrive in Hong Kong.
She then went on to talk about ‘moments of truth’ and how each interaction with an organisation influences our opinion of them. Focusing on the Department of Work and Pensions, she talked about how an organisation which has 22million, interacting with customers on a daily basis, can deliver their brand promise.
Karen ended her talk by introducing the ‘Whole System Perspective’ model; Foresight, Insight, Action. She talked through how organisations she has worked with have utilised this virtuous circle to deliver results. Watch the video here
Delegates enjoyed drinks and canapés on the Courthouse Hotel rooftop terrace to a wonderful sunset at the networking reception following the talk.
December 8 was the final BridgeTalks evening for 2015, and delegates were joined by not one, but two speakers on the topic of Storytelling at the Courthouse Hotel. Robert Pratten, Founder and CEO of Transmedia Storyteller joined BridgeTalks, as well as Alison Esse, Co-Founder and Director of the Storytellers.
‘Storytelling’ is a methodology and tool that allows businesses to implement organisation-wide change; it engages and aligns employees to drive culture and performance whilst drawing consumers into the brand identity and promise.
The talk was opened by Dale Smith, Director of Creation at Bridge Training & Events. Dale introduced the topic with some of his own experience with storytelling, working with clients and in his own life.
Robert Pratten is CEO and Founder of Transmedia Storyteller Ltd, creators of Conducttr. Robert took delegates through just some of the successful projects and uses of the audience engagement software. Transmedia Storyteller uses multiple platforms to immerse users in a storytelling experience that parallels their real life through interactive storytelling to engage users and convey messages.
With a background in PR and Marketing, Alison Esse co-founded The Storytellers in 2003, bringing together a collective of expertise in change, strategic communications, graphic and event design, film and project management to form a pioneering approach to culture change and strategy engagement in large organisations. During the talk, Alison brought to life case studies through stories as well as giving delegates insight into The Storytellers’ methodology.
Delegates enjoyed drinks and canapés at the networking reception following the talk in the Courthouse Hotel bar.
The count down is definitely on to BridgeCon2015 and the preparations for a great few days are well underway. If you have yet to book your ticket, I encourage you to do so as it helps the Bridge Team to ensure that all arrangements are fine-tuned to each delegate’s requirements.
Each week I have put the spotlight on various speakers presenting throughout Day One and today it is my absolute pleasure to focus on Simon Lewis and the Eau-mazing case study that he will bring to life at the conference. As our final keynote speaker of the day, Simon will take delegates across the Atlantic (though not literally!) and share the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa brand, people and culture journey.
Having been personally involved in this transformation project, and having spent a great deal of time both at the hotel and amongst what I consider to be some of the best hoteliers in the industry, I know that this talk is one not to miss. Simon is a true visionary and I feel honoured that he has taken time from his incredibly busy schedule to come share this story with BridgeCon delegates.
Simon leads the charge for employee engagement and building a culture that truly reflects the brand values and ultimately creates a customer experience that leaves hotel guest with Goosebumps. This is a good thing as ‘Goosebumps’ just happens to be one of the Eau values. Not only did he and his team transform a hotel, they shaped an industry by setting the creativity benchmark that many only aspire to.
