Latest posting There’s plenty of doom and gloom about. But it’s always this way in the eye of an economic storm. Yes, there’s a certain macabre fascination watching the car crash that is global finance play out before our eyes. But, as the ancient wisdom goes, the fast track to feeling more empowered is to focus on what you can personally influence. We all have some degree of empowerment in the workplace, whether we’re the CEO or a first-line manager.

If the barrage of statistics is to be believed (and it’s not fair just to trust the bad news), companies with high employee engagement levels grow on average 4.5 times faster than those with low levels (Hays 2010).

As I illustrate in Brand Champions, engaged employees are:
R- receptive
I - involved
P -  proactive
E - energised and energising

So, why not try these top tips to promote the engagement drive within your own organisation. Most of them are free:

1. Give recognition
If someone has done well, let them know you know it. A simple thank you goes a long way to increasing engagement, so catch them doing the right thing.

2. Give constructive feedback
Managers giving little or no feedback to their workers fail to engage 98 per cent of them, according to a 2009 study by Gallup. Let employees know how they are doing and what they can do to improve. It’s worth giving your first-line managers in particular training on how to do this.

3. Incentivise good work
Ensure that your HR processes are hard-wired to recognise objectives that are “on brand” and “on strategy”.

4. Create an engaging culture
An open door policy creates an approachable feel to the office, where employees feel comfortable. Ensure management have a physical presence in the office and are role models for your core values.

5. Involve people
Self-managing teams are engagement nirvana. Involving people in company decisions will make them feel part of the organisation and give them a real sense of ownership.

6.Keep people informed
Don’t assume that people don’t know or don’t need to know. They will appreciate being in the loop about any changes in the company. Internal communication must do more than SOS (send out stuff).

7. Encourage suggestions and input
Let them know their opinions count…. chances are the answers to your issues can be solved in-house.

8. Promote role models
Rather than favouring favourites look to unusual suspects for examples of great practice and celebrate them. This will engage more people than you can imagine.

9. Encourage training, development and a career path
Stress the benefits of working for your brand including developing new skills and having a career path in return for development. Relationships count but they need to be nurtured.

10. Focus on their talents
Get to know the “real people” who work for you. Play some games. Find out what talents they have or want to have. Use these when delegating projects to ensure they are using their talents and developing in the right areas.
Comments [0] Recent postings

It was fascinating to read a recent study suggesting that as youth unemployment reaches a new high, 14-15 year old people’s career aspirations don’t match requirements for economic growth.
The survey claims that major British industries are facing a talent shortage unless they can shake off their unattractive images.

According to more than 1,000 young people surveyed by Magnified Learning, the jobs that are apparently essential for economic growth are “boring”. For example:
• less than 3 per cent of young people considered the environment sector – marked by David Cameron as a vital industry for economic growth
• least popular was public transport with less than 2 per cent of young people choosing a career in the sector
• just 3 per cent showed an interest in the energy sector.
Jobs in the media and creative industries may be the only sectors to score consistently well among young people approaching working age. But then I wanted to captain the England rugby team and drive for Ferrari when I was a teenager!

The director of Magnified Learning, Chris Horton, was quoted as saying: “The high levels of youth unemployment are alarming, but even more alarming is that our research shows that the industries in which there are likely to be jobs opening up for young people, are not even being considered by the vast majority of them.
“We believe tackling these negative perceptions is a two-way process, and it is important that industry leaders recognise their responsibility to engage with the next generation in order to foster new talent. It will be impossible for the UK economy to thrive if we can’t convince young Britons that such career paths are worth aspiring to.”

Of course, HR functions have a part to play on the demand side of the equation. But it isn’t necessarily the one hinted at by Chris Horton.

I’m less convinced by the traditional thinking that new talent equals young talent. The bad news for these young folk is that the biggest issues we see when working with organisations currently have little to do with solely attracting fresh talent. The greatest challenge by far is re-engaging, energising and making the most of largely disengaged existing talent, where investment will stay within the “family” and there will be no acquisition costs.

Once again, the call goes out to HR directors across sectors to open their eyes to the reality that the bulk of their employment brand efforts should be directed at developing truly sustainable performance cultures and liberating the potential of existing employees not just on attracting new. Much more effective to create attractive brands from within by developing an appropriate culture, and to influence perceptions of the next generation in that way, than to plug a leaking bucket with external PR when the words and figures differ for those who join.

As the old saying goes “if you build it (properly) they will come”!

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This party political conference season comes at a time when the general leadership landscape feels strangely bereft of vision, initiative and inspiration. Yet how many delegates and voters feel engaged by the ritual?
David Cameron, for example, has called for a “can do” spirit. Yet the audience will see very little to invigorate them and precious little “doing”. There are many similarities between party political conferences and corporate events, don’t you think?

We see speeches written for the file and delivered in order of leadership hierarchy; attacks on the opposition to deflect attention from the absence of strategy; lectures from lecterns delivered to passive crowds; communication teams who SOS (“send out stuff”) aimed at internal marketing post event; and insincere and self congratulatory photo calls and hand clasping.

These assemblies have become rituals with little relevance to the end stakeholder, the voter. Party membership rarely increases as a consequence and voting has been steadily declining for some time.
Similarly, many employees and paying punters are disenfranchised rather than energised by gatherings. Why? Well, a clue is in the famous Cole Porter song: it’s just “another opn’in of another show”.

We’ve just completed another high profile brand champions engagement event to rave reviews from our client. As ever, the seemingly seamless delivery by the fab facilitation team and beaming faces belies the road of trials that eventually culminated in the gathering. While it was a powerful, educational and inspiring “show”, engagement can’t be achieved with a one off, a cathartic entertainment. The principles have to be role modelled daily if the effects are to last. The culture has to evolve to embrace engagement principles perpetually.

Fortunately the road of change for these champions is going to be made all the easier by their colleagues, comrades and allies. They include the classic brand engagement trio of HR/Marketing and Comms with strong MD/CEO support who all led by example at the gathering. They will be sustained by compelling communication and the promise of a campaign mentality

The champions event was an important, but not defining stage in the engagement programme. It was a classic and energising milestone in the journey. But the real adventure really does start once the applause dies down. If only the politicians could learn that lesson.

Ian’s second book, Brand Champions is available now

Comments [0] Ian Buckingham thinks employers serious about improving performance should let their workforce’s inner geek take over

Action Man was ‘Toy of the Decade’ at the end of the ‘80s. Before the age of video games, millions of kids used Action Man in real games, and the fantasy they created was as vivid and involving as pressing buttons on a PlayStation. My colleague, Kevin Thomson, was the brand manager for Action Man brand and studied games activity with child psychologists in focus groups across the country.

What’s this got to do with ‘employee engagement’? A lot, as we’ve pointed out previously. Games are part of life’s fantasy: we grew up playing them, they helped us experiment with and make sense of the world. For hundreds of millions of people they still do, not just ‘game geeks’, but for every age group and games genre, from successive board game devotees to the 50 million-plus people on FarmVille, to the whole family on the Wii.

It’s not hard to see how work can be seen as one big game, with the board set out before us in the workplace like Risk or chess. We have our visions, missions, and role-playing from Ceo to the front line. We have our uniforms, our enemies (the competition – or is it the customer?). We have our stories of successes and failures, winner and losers.
The ‘masters of the universe’ in the finance industry even created a real life Monopoly, using our properties, with lots of losers, and a world recession.

Work is a grown-up version of the games we played as kids. But the world of games just got a lot more sophisticated. The difference today between real toys in real games, and stories in the $multi-billion video games industry is the ability to analyse every move you make, across billions of interactions.

Games companies, like World of Warcraft, with millions of people as players, can observe all these interactions as they play. The psychology is laid bare as the buttons are pressed. So today we have a new game to play, rather awfully called ‘gamification’.

This is the application of gaming in non-game environments. It’s a new way of exciting customers and staff. It comes to the fore as we see the real power of applying the psychology of games to non-game environments at work including recruitment and retention; engagement; product branding, on-line promotion and advertising.

Gamification may be a silly word but the seriousness of it lies in achieving greater performance through applying games techniques to business. We’ve used it to great effect in business simulations geared towards stimulating innovation and values-based leadership training. I’ve said it before, but involvement is one of the keys to employee engagement, so if you want your leaders and employees to go the extra mile, and help lift the recessionary gloom, go on, let them play games!Comments [0]

Nation and place branding is an established professional discipline. So why don’t we apply principles like the establishment of vision, mission, values, behaviours, culture development and leadership development, all components vital for bringing brands to life from within, to the way we engage people with their national brands?

Perhaps there has never really been a “burning platform”? Well, the recent economic crisis that has rocked ideologies like consumerism and the widespread riots in England, for example, may well suggest that we have a constitutional crisis now. Yet we’re obsessing about punishing and policing instead.

Perhaps it’s the fact that we like to believe in self-determinism and so-called free-market thinking and that too much central involvement feels like “nanny state” or “social engineering”? Perhaps. Yet we still have politicians elected on the back of falling voter numbers organising and governing our institutions.

Or perhaps it’s simply that, as residents and citizens, we don’t have enough faith in the way the organisations we work for involve, consult and engage with us (as the plethora of negative data suggests), and consequently reject the same approaches within society? Perhaps, but there’s nothing wrong with those processes and principles, albeit plenty of room for improvement in terms of application.

Whatever the reasons, it’s a sad fact that there is clearly an engagement problem within national and business communities which is damaging some national brands. This is largely the result of an extremely worrying leadership gap:


- Bank leaders paying bonuses indirectly funded by pension shortfalls and public sector cuts.
- Mass MP expenses outrage
- Seemingly constant sex scandals within the religious establishment
- Immoral and ill-mannered millionaire sports stars
- Spin vs authentic communication and relationship management
- “Get famous at all costs”, trash tv
- Phone tapping journalists
- Lying CEOs
- Disingenuous marketing and selling techniques
- Telephone competition scandals within the TV networks
- Police corruption
- Barely justifiable wars in the Middle East wrapped in the veil of a de- stabilising “war on terror”
- The disease of negative journalism
- Spiraling energy costs to support shareholder profits
- Rampant consumerism despite warnings about the impact on our ecology
….the list goes on.


I happen to believe that one of the answers to bridging this gap lies in consultation, involvement and in re-vitalising values-based leadership development, whether for MDs or, in fact, MPs. I believe that if undertaken properly, this will lead to stakeholder engagement. If pursued with honesty, passion and conviction I believe that this will result in sustainable brand development. But most importantly, I believe that this engagement-based thinking applies as readily to brand Britain as it does to Britain’s brands.

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So-called social media, the much-abused misnomer for the relatively new technological, almost virtual, communication gathering points fed largely by constantly evolving gadgets, is literally fantastic.

What had latterly been the stuff of fantasy has led to social and business revolutions, has liberated many a Dilbert from their cubicle, and has clearly added a whole new dimension to communication. I’m a big fan. However, I’ve always maintained that Facebook would never replace face time and it would appear that I’m not alone.

An article in the Harvard Business Review backs up my sense of perspective and belief in the importance of the interpersonal moment, pointing out that, despite the rise in the influence of “the machines”, “the face-to-face conference business is robust, we’re flying more miles than ever to interact with others, the brightest minds still converge on innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, and collaborative spaces in firms are increasingly popular”.

I was surprised to discover, for example, while working with UK super-technology brand ARM Holdings, that engagement is “all talk” there and their boffins hardly ever use internal social media, most of their communal communication being face to face. Their directors clock up masses of air miles ensuring that they visit their global offices regularly and pride themselves on their huddle meetings and open door policy.

As with many things in life, the answer doesn’t lie at the extremes but in the blend. The common touch has never been more important. Success clearly lies in appreciating the technology for what it is and integrating it with all-important, multi-sensory, face to face and cheek by jowl, congregating, gathering in person, pressing flesh, eyeballing and communing with colleagues.

And there’s no more important time to promote this approach than during periods of attrition when communities need leaders and the reassurance of warm words and a confidence-boosting arm around the shoulder.

Comments [2] I’ve recently been helping a couple of organisations find ways to re-connect with their employees following record falls in employee confidence and pride in the brands they work for.

The conversations we’ve been having with employees at all levels have centred around prevailingly negative public perceptions about the way the organisations they work for conduct business, especially the way they market their services and their direct sales techniques.

At the core of the employees’ issues have been:

• a growing sense that, while there are theoretical two-way channels in place, they aren’t being listened to

• a growing cynicism about the values the organisations publish to all stakeholders and the way the leaders talk about customers

• an innate insecurity about the notion of a career with them, given there is a perception that a growing number of new recruits are either locum workers or job-hopping every 18 months or so.

Of course, we’re trying to substantiate their comments with some hard facts but, regardless of how the statistics stack up, these issues were echoed at all levels when we investigated the sliding engagement figures.

Our last meeting was on 4 July, a date when there’s much “hootin and tootin” about US Independence. Regardless of your own ideological leanings, it has to be said there’s a certain pervading clarity about the American way that is rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s work in crafting the Declaration of Independence.

This single document became a powerful manifesto for the creation of a nation and has become a totemic rallying point for US ideology ever since. Whether you like or agree with American culture, you have to respect the foundations on which the culture is built.

Given the investment every employee makes in terms of the time they devote to the organisations they work for, and the role those organisations play in meeting so many of an individual’s basic and higher order needs, it’s only natural that the relationship between people and their work is going to be an emotional one. To fail to recognise this relationship, to treat people like numbers, to give them an official message about how to behave but unofficially expect them to “win at all costs”, or to patronise and dump messages on them using internal marketing and spin, is ridiculous.

Values are the fundamental building blocks of a brand. They set the tone and the basis for the emotional contract between employees and their employer. In a week when yet another brand, this time The News of The World, implodes on the back of another values and culture-based brand disaster, isn’t it time we started valuing values again?Comments [2]

I know it’s not very fashionable to talk about what motivates people at the moment. As we all know, it’s an employer’s market and survival and job security is understandably an obsession. But even though employees have undoubtedly slipped quite some way down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, fear and drum-banging cascade communication will never be enough to sustain performance indefinitely. And surely even the most hard-nosed FD must have one eye on the consequences of recovery.

Almost every week now we’re hearing about employee engagement studies like this one from the Hay Group. Yet we’re still shocked that, despite the fact that most business leaders identify disengaged employees as one of the top three most significant threats facing their business, very few ever discuss it in the boardroom.

So what can we infer from this paradox? That the leaders don’t really care? That they feel they can get away with doing nothing? That they are wary of stirring up a hornet’s nest if they start beating the OD bushes and aren’t sure about how to deal with the consequences? I have my theories. You make up your own minds.

Against this disconcerting backdrop, it’s interesting to note the swelling tide of articles stressing the importance of culture and employee engagement. One of the latest is by GE exponent Ron Ashkenas in the Harvard Business Review outlining the need to focus on evolving culture development rather than dictating change.

Regardless of the apparent gap between leadership thinking and doing, it’s interesting to observe that authenticity emerges time and again at the heart of the engagement and culture discussions.

Genuine, trustworthy communication is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of employee engagement. It encourages openness and honesty and stimulates involvement, all qualities which are critical to developing and sustaining a culture of performance.

True performance cultures aren’t just short-term focused. They are sustainable and are based on mutual trust and respect. Only a fool focuses solely on the outputs without devoting time and effort to understanding and replicating the conditions that maximise returns.

Job security, pay and rations are clearly very important. But true wisdom lies with the 30 to 40 per cent of leaders who not only acknowledge but, right now, despite the downturn, are putting in place systematic engagement and culture development strategies to not just survive but move ahead of the game.

What category does your leadership team fall into?

Comments [1] The wrong approach could have the “Blackburn effect”, says Ian Buckingham

When Indian group Venky's acquired English football club Blackburn Rovers, they presumably intended to stay out of the changing room and off the pitch. However, their first big decision to sack their very experienced manager at the beginning of the season arguably destabilised the former Premier League champions to such an extent that Rovers only narrowly avoided relegation.

Blackburn in mind, I was puzzled to read Ratan Tata’s comments in The Times in which he criticised the working practices of UK managers in general claiming that they fail to go the extra mile. In my view, he made matters worse by forcing the Times to print an apology about the article because it implied that he was criticising his own UK employees:

“We are happy to clarify that Mr Tata did not use the word ‘lazy’. His comments related to his view of the environment which existed when the Tata Group bought JLR and Corus and UK managers generally and were not about his current management and staff.”

Tata’s comments belie the fact that UK managers in general already have the longest weekly working hours in the European Union. Effort clearly isn’t the issue. Engagement, however, may well be a different story.

I’ve visited a number of the Tata operations in India. While there is much to admire about the group and their operating model is clearly appropriate for the Indian economy, it’s debatable whether the improved performance of JLR is more than one of the recession-borne anomalies of the luxury goods market or, more importantly, whether there’s much for UK managers to learn from their Tata counterparts when it comes to effort or even ingenuity.

The UK market is struggling with very different issues and if the noise in the market summed up in the CIPD engagement report into engagement levels Creating an Engaged Workforce is to be believed, the issues in the UK are less about working harder and a lot about working smarter. A sizeable proportion of UK leaders clearly need to re-connect, re-engage and re-energise employees and colleagues.

There’s a popular misconception about engagement, that it’s somehow about teasing out and tapping into discretionary effort. Sure, that’s part of it. But it’s wrong to suggest that employee engagement is all about going the extra mile in extraordinary circumstances. Employee engagement shouldn’t be an exceptional or discretionary activity, it should be the norm.

As I argue in Brand Champions, engaged employees are:

• Receptive and open
• Involved and involving
• Proactive, go the extra mile, innovate
• Energised
• Achievers, they get results
• Advocates

Our current research suggests that achieving results is the most important indicator, being involved and involving comes second and, surprisingly, being an innovator comes last by some distance.

While there’s much about Mr Tata’s comments that I would disagree with, his criticism has added extra weight to the UK engagement debate. I rather suspect that managers under siege, struggling to compensate for the slings and arrows of outrageous economic fortune, may not currently be as open, involved, involving and engaging as they would like to be. An appreciative and respectful approach, enlightened internal communication and values-based leadership development can certainly help create stability and a platform for engagement. Criticising or even sacking UK managers, however, is more likely to have the Blackburn effect.
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HR can help professional services firms to ‘grow the brand’ by encouraging cultural change, says Ian Buckingham

As we witness the rapid and messy implosion of the superinjunction in the face of guerrilla communication and the high-profile demise of the head of the IMF, it would appear that behaviour is in the spotlight once again.

I was speaking at an event last week attended by more than 40 senior names from the professional services sector. The core theme was brand development and brand engagement, an area of increasing relevance for this sector that has hitherto relied on the superhero/star-chamber model epitomised by the names above the door.

Professional services firms, particularly the legal ones, are gradually recognising the importance of differentiation when it comes to competition for market share, mergers and acquisitions, succession and, yes, the war for talent. Consequently the role of HR may be assuming new-found prominence, given they are responsible for ensuring that the values, culture and people processes – such as recruitment, performance management, and training and development – support rather than undermine the brand. They are accountable, ultimately, for ensuring that employees – and partners – keep the promises their firms make to their customers.

The various debates were fascinating, not least the shared insight that reputation, rather than brand, has greater resonance with partners. It was also apparent that in many firms the top team still resists attempts to include them in the common employee throng, making it extremely difficult for change facilitators to ensure consistency when communicating the firm’s brand.

There was a shared acknowledgement, however, that culture development is becoming increasingly important as a way of focusing on behaviour that may help differentiate one firm from the next in the eyes of the customer. But the change agents’ lot is not an easy one.

In such a politically charged environment, where hierarchy is still king, an objective “third way” can be very helpful. Measurement, in the form of a pragmatic and tailored employee engagement gauge, or culture benchmarking facility like the Organisation Culture Index, can be very powerful, especially if linked to customer data. HR has the opportunity to play an important role bridging the internal and external stakeholder communities.

Despite the inherent difficulties, HR functions can be hugely influential drivers of culture improvement to grow the brand, especially if they have the ability to convince the stars in the chambers that there’s a business case for change by asking the killer question “what price reputation?”

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