Would it surprise you to learn that the most senior communications professional within one of the leading petro chemical companies currently uses sensitive state of the art IT technology to monitor webinar and teleconference effectiveness and participation?  

Would you be shocked to hear that one of the most high profile government departments has the slickest team briefing process you’ll ever read or that  one of Europe’s leading utility companies has the highest intranet and so called “social media” involvement rates you’re ever likely to see? 

I guess we all expect major corporates and professional organisations to be at the forefront of internal communication management. So why is it that each of these organisations came bottom in a recent cross industry employee engagement poll? 

The bare faced truth of the matter is that, despite their focus on state of the art technology and exceptional process design, they just don’t get the basics right.  

The petro chemical company has no top level communications calendar, their intranet is an over-burdened supertanker which has run aground on a reef of indifference and employees have started voting with their feet at Town Halls held by their senior leaders. 

The government department employed an expensive creative agency to develop their team briefing collateral but thousands of worthy, well-meaning newsletters are casually cast aside. Forgotten, forlorn and unread because the newsletter content ignores the interests of the audience they have:

-         no explicit link to strategic objectives

-         they discourage feedback from readers

-         they are full of self-congratulatory spin and HR propaganda

 -        they fail to acknowledge the real issues

-         and they lack humanity and authenticity.  

Their team briefing process has become a written cascade because their senior civil servants find it difficult to overcome the traditional hierarchical structure and few have the skills and ability to engage effectively with their line reports. 

Each organisation talks about “inverting the pyramid” and bringing the employee voice to the fore.  But in the admirable pursuit of internal communication excellence they’ve lost sight of the basics and the employee voice is more of a nervous whisper. 

An interesting contrast comes in the unlikely form of a technology company I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past few years and have watched grow both in the UK and globally. They are true innovators and leaders in the field of technology driven customer communication yet their own intranet is only an afterthought in their ten strong internal communication channel strategy. 

Their directors strive constantly to ensure that they and their line managers work in partnership to prioritise:

 -  global face to face communication and only host webinars and teleconferences as an absolute last resort

-    communication skills training and include employee engagement in their line manager’s performance contracts

-   fundamental communication skills courses in their management development programme including writing and personal impact skills

-   storytelling structures in the way they communicate the evolution of the brand both internally and externally

-    best practice in the way they facilitate their team briefing sessions

-    face to face conferences, events and induction processes and refuse to communicate by email bulletin cascades

-     achieving balance between process management and culture development

It’s refreshing to see that the most effective approach to internal communication is to get the basics right first and foremost. In these austere times it’s just as good to be reminded that, with a professional internal communication team in place, much of the above can be achieved relatively cheaply.  

We all love a flash new toy or two but whether you can afford it or not, whatever you do don’t develop a case of technology envy at the expense of promoting classic skills. With an objective nudge in the right direction and the modest investment of time, easily financed by a relatively simple re-focus of learning and development priorities, there really shouldn’t be any need to re invent the wheel.  

I was in the City, London’s financial district, for a meeting the other day and found myself in Pudding Lane.  For those who don’t know, this modest little street is infamous for being the source of the great fire of London, heralded by historians as the most tragic event to have befallen London as well as its saviour.

But “how can this contradiction hold true?” I hear you cry.  Well London had been in the grip of another epic threat at the time of the fire, namely the plague or black death. Many believe this cataclysmic malaise to have been caused by rats. In truth it wasn’t the rats, but the fleas that lived on the rats that caused the spread of the infection.

Ironically it was the catastrophic great fire that finally purged the City of the disease.

Now what has this trip through London’s history books got to do with matters in CEO land?

As we all know, the corridors of CEO land are populated by a nodding, bowing and scraping populace doffing their caps to the demi gods. Yet it’s increasingly the ceos or chief engagement officers i.e. the line managers, who do the real work.

It also can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the financial districts are being targeted by the worldwide press as the source of the current economic disease that is infecting world markets.  Indeed the high profile figureheads, the CEOs of a select number of those organisations within those financial districts are being demonised for seemingly single handedly bringing about the collapse of those institutions and indeed, spreading this economic plague to related markets and economies.

This is where history and imagination collide.  But if we allow ourselves to believe tabloid caricatures of “Fred the shred” and his peer group we undermine the core philosophy on which this column is based.  While I do subscribe to the notion that the CEO can wield exceptional power, he doesn’t do it alone. The iniquity of the CEOs themselves and problems the City faces are just the symptoms of a much, much more insidious infection.  The disease of selfishness, short termism and winning at all costs has become a plague which has arguably spread throughout Western commerce. Simply getting rid of the CEOs isn’t going to cure the problem.

Would anyone reading this column deny that they feel uncomfortable about the way many of their customer service interactions, regardless of industry, are handled these days? From the volumes of unsolicited cold calls we receive, the cost cutting off-shoring of our intimate data, the proliferation of mistakes or the relentless emails can anyone claim that customer service has improved in the last decade? Can you picture the last time you received excellent service which exuded empathy, humility and pride?  I bet you can think of several examples when a frontline employee called you “mate” instead of by your name, was clearly following a pre-determined script or appeared to have had an authenticity bi-pass, however.

The risk we currently face is that in a desperate attempt to fight the current economic disease, the focus is going to be exclusively on the high profile figures, forgetting that the disease has already spread and infected the culture of the organisations they headed up. 

Unless we can whip up a firestorm of people centred change that will:

-         reinvent HR

-         proactively manage employer brand

-         professionalize communications

-         respect and prioritise organisation development

-         focus on the development of line managers as a priority

-         forge more effective relationships between the external manifestation of brand and the link to the organisation’s values and the employees who keep the promises

this disease is going to spread and spread.

Food for thought, but lean times are quite possibly causing you to consider postponing that employee survey; to cut back on your training budget; to force through more “push communication” or prioritise that pile of  impressive looking resumes of former “big hitters” who seem to hop from company to company every two years above appraisals of existing employees. 

If you’re considering “re-sizing”, pause for a second before you reach for the axe, and consider your existing employees once again.  What more can you do to re-connect them with the brand they’ve been loyal to for so long? How can you re-focus them on the next phase in the evolution of the company, to re-energise them?

Now look again at those cvs. 

You may think you know who the rats are…. but remember the humble flea!

Still struggling to make the business case for employer branding? 

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Available now: Brand Engagement - How Employees Make or Break Brands (Buckingham, Palgrave/Macmillan 2007)

It’s unfortunate that most of the growing army of critics weighing down the creaking

employee engagement bandwagon come from the camp of the bleeding heart.  They’re the

ones with the “staff are our greatest asset” t-shirts who trot out unsubstantiated clichés about obligations, rights and respect. Sadly they damage rather than help their cause by undermining the credibility of the people-focused functions through failing to work with the prevailing culture in order to influence that culture for the better.

The fact is that there’s a far more compelling case for employee engagement and culture development than empathy and magnanimousness.  Finance directors seldom liberate budgets without a compelling business case. It’s also a fact that, unlike much external investment, the majority of culture development and internal brand engagement activity is reliant upon discretionary spend. We all know how hard it is to loosen the discretionary purse strings in the good times let alone in a downturn.

So how do you build a business case for employee engagement? I believe it’s important to keep things as simple as possible.  David Bolchover, for example, in his book The Living Dead*, states that in the UK alone, doctor’s receive over 9 million “suspect” requests for sick notes per year (equivalent to the entire population of Sweden).  In addition one in three midweek visitors to a major theme park are pulling a sickie from work.  Do the maths for your organisation and you’ll soon have the makings of your own business case for engaging employees in the business by engaging them with the brand.

If this is still too abstract, you could adopt the en vogue concept of employer brand as your starting point.  Employer brand is shorthand for the brand projected to employees and recruits. It is reliant upon the close management of key people processes like recruitment, induction, performance management and internal communication. Employee engagement and employer brand are very close bedfellows and the business case for investing in either should be built on a platform that includes:

-          The true cost of recruitment and retention (including agency fees, salaries, advertising, induction and orientation etc)

-          The cost of non-conformance (This is the impact of failing to fulfil brand promises to employees and new recruits.  It is not just whether recruitment partners in the supply chain perform but whether your recruitment professionals are recruiting to a model based upon the desired future culture rather than fit with the existing culture. In the UK alone around approximately 365 million pounds is wasted on ineffective graduate hires**)

-          The impact of creeping brand death and deadweight (What percentage of your employees turn up but have switched off or worse still, have switched allegiance? If you have employee surveys do they role model your brand values in the way they are implemented? How do they feed back into strategy and are you even bothering to measure employee engagement properly?)

As Steve McKevitt illustrates in City Slackers***, spotting the brand dead is a tricky task to implement from the heady heights of the C suite. But if I tell you that a group of disengaged public sector employees recently brought down their own CEO by leaking their version of the stories their Communications Director had carefully spoonfed the press you’ll get the idea about how important it is. Now picture how long and how widely these disaffected individuals had been bad mouthing the organisation and the impact on internal morale as well as public opinion. Time to start dusting down those surveys or reprioritising that engagement research?

 Ian

We’re all familiar with the cliché that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In fact it’s the philosophy on which process management methodologies like Total Quality Management and Kaizen are based.  But what has process and systems thinking got to do with the subtle arts of people-centred services like HR management, Organisation Development and the concept of Employer Brand?

As some of you will know, I believe the term employer brand is a misnomer. As I’ve stressed in this column previously, Employer Brand is only half the story.  It represents the “promise making” part of the equation.  A more appropriate term is Employment Brand which takes into account the promises made by the organisation about the working practices, values, norms - or put another way - the culture, but also factors in the reality and actual employee feedback about the delivery of the promise.

We’re accustomed to seeing the application of principles like customer relationship management and the management of the customer value chain by our marketing colleagues concerned with the brand projected to customers.  But how many of our HR colleague are applying similar principles to the management of the employment brand.  I would suggest, right at this moment, very few.

The value of a process-focused approach to managing Employment Brand is that it:

- stimulates cooperation between the key internal stakeholders responsible for managing the links in the chain

- it drives consistency in how the brand is interpreted and communicated

- it encourages performance measures at each link in the chain and provides a platform for more effective relationship management at each stage

To illustrate my point, take a wander through the vacancy pages of even premier recruitment sites like Changeboard, and PR Week.  How many simple but explicit errors can you detect in the advertisements?  Now ask yourself how this makes you feel about the capability of the agency in question to manage your account, cv or personal profile with appropriate care and sensitivity.  If you’re the client of the agency, how well do you think they are representing your brand and what are the explicit and opportunity costs of these errors?

It’s a little unfair to single out the recruitment agencies that are largely reliant upon the quality of the briefing they receive from our own ceos, but hopefully it helps to illustrate my point.  It’s tough for HR professional to ensure they are sufficiently in tune with the strategic goals of the business and translating this data into the processes they promote and stakeholders they rely upon as they manage the evolution of the Employment Brand. 

What is clear, however, is that managing the Employment Brand does call for systems thinking.  And this presents another opportunity for collaboration with our more explicitly external facing colleagues in order to bring the brand to life from inside.

Ian

The importance of managing employee perceptions has given rise to the contemporary notion of Employer Brand.  This is essentially the brand the employer projects to existing and potential employees via the chain of communication touch points ranging from recruitment intermediaries through to line managers. 

I believe, however, that by focusing on Employer Brand, the HR community runs the risk of become obsessed with only half the story. If we accept that a brand is simply a set of promises unless people keep those promises then a more accurate and effective descriptor for this aspect of internal brand management is Employment Brand.  This reflects the difference between the espoused or promised brand and actual experience and points to the importance of culture management.

As the employer brand tends to fall within the remit of the people-centred functions (usually HR) and the brand projected to customers remains ring-fenced by the Marketing functions, the seeds are sown for brand warfare perpetuating multiple value sets, confused behaviours and creeping brand death if the situation persists.  This internal brand warfare is rife across sectors and undermines the effectiveness of the brand management process.  One of the battalions critical to the outcome of this war is the internal communication function. The brand projected by this function will largely be reliant upon the reporting line of this function.  Research indicates (see Buckingham, Brand Engagement www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=281268 ) that HR may well be winning this particular war as HR functions are increasingly adopting Internal Communication within their remit.

This trend towards HR dominated internal communication is exposing effective brand management to increasing risk of failure however because:

1. HR budgets for internal communication and employee engagement are largely discretionary and are very exposed when the balance sheet comes under threat
2. HR functions have a habit of perpetuating additional value sets and complex behavioural matrices than those espoused by their marketing counterparts which can lead to duplication, complication, confusion and behaviour that is not “on brand”
3. Internal communication should be regarded as a professional discipline in its own right.  It is not internal marketing and PR and is not employee consultation nor is it message management.

The most obvious answer is to encourage more effective partnerships between HR and Marketing and to professionalize internal communication in the interest of managing the brand from both the internal and external perspective.

Largely as a consequence of the scenario detailed, employee communication tends to be project based and tactical, cascaded or marketing-think applied to the internal market.  Written communication dominates whereas face to face communication via line managers is proven, time and again, to be the most effective communication.  Employee engagement can’t be conscripted, cascaded or aligned however tricky the internal marketing process.  It has to be developed from the ground upwards and packaged in a manner that is appropriate to the culture of the organisation in question.  It must also role model the aspirational brand values. 

Consider many financial service brands as a case in point.  Reflect on how many FS brands project brand values like integrity, trust, heritage, customer service and professionalism?  Employees understand that this is a marketing stance. Too many however, also understand that the prevailing internal culture is increasingly characterised by winning, eliminating competition, survival of the fittest and short-termism.  Internal brand alignment activity which does not acknowledge the current culture and is therefore inauthentic is a waste of money at best.  It is interesting to note that the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has recently announced a pending package of protectionist measures geared towards encouraging medium to long term thinking within the FS markets and to address iniquities in the reward structures of many financial services organisations. The provocative question is that if they were actually living the brands they espouse would this intervention be necessary?   He is simply acknowledging what employees have known for years (and many customers), that the brand values projected belie the internal culture.  When that happens for long enough it gives rise to brand disasters on the scale we’ve seen recently which many critics have foreseen for some time.

The answer to this brand challenge has to be to unite the internal and external facing brand custodians to develop a holistic engagement programme which is appropriate to both markets.  It must, however, be based upon a sound and clear business case and appropriately funded as a “must have” rather than “nice to have”. I also believe that the key facilitator should be the CEO and that accountability for the success of the holistic brand management programme should be focused on the medium rather than short term which will prevent money being wasted on Big Bang engagement initiatives which are a welcome diversion from normality but rarely work. I believe that there is a route-map of key principles underpinning experience based employee brand engagement but no one size fits all packageable approach.

Food for thought?

Ian

WASP males don’t tend to get too many invitations to be involved in the promotion of diversity management; which is a shame really.  I’m a firm believer in the notion that the promotion of diversity should embrace the full range of stakeholders; it should truly practice inclusiveness in the way stakeholders are engaged with the philosophy or it runs the risk of being seen as a marginal activity aimed at an exclusive audience.  A “push” communication approach may be one of the reasons why the diversity flag bearers within organisations sometimes find themselves struggling for real influence at the top table.

But this thought piece isn’t to critique the notion of diversity or challenge its increasing relevance to the organisation development and employee engagement agenda. I would like to share a rare moment of Belgian enlightenment.

Picture the scene.  The wonderful and irrepressibly inspirational Myrtha Casanova of the The European Institute for Managing Diversity had enlisted my help to co-facilitate a workshop she was running with the senior executives of a global producer of cereal crops and foodstuffs.  They had been embroiled in a PR war with NGOs and pressure groups worldwide because of controversial growing techniques and what was perceived as an arrogant communication stance.

The workshops were intended to develop diversity strategies across their global businesses.  Most of their senior executives were gathered in Belgium to that end – and they weren’t very pleased about it.

It was soon clear that their beleaguered HR Director had been forced into developing a diversity strategy by the board who were in turn responding to US legislation.  The executive cadre encamped in Belgium were 90% male, mostly of Anglo Saxon origin and frankly, felt they had much more pressing priorities.  In short, the workshops quickly regressed into trench warfare.

The turning point came, however, shortly after lunch on day one when, rather than push more and more statistics, facts and process at the group, we adopted a less evangelical approach and asked them to explore their brand from the customer’s perspective.  

They had traditionally seen themselves as a business to business organisation but it took one of the more junior managers, who also happened to have the largest team and who also happened to be a woman, to point out that housewives could make or break their company.  By drawing a simple supply chain model she was able to quickly illustrate the route their product ultimately followed to market and how it was immaterial that they weren’t putting the bread on the shelves themselves. Women still make the vast majority of purchasing decisions per household and the retailers were reliant upon their suppliers to provide raw materials in tune with the ethics and values of the consumer.  An epiphany!

This simple, jaw-dropping moment proves to be a revelation for her cynical peers who had clearly spent years developing competencies and promoting values appropriate for managing their equally macho purchasing managers in the businesses they were selling to.  Suddenly the link between organisational culture and their PR problems was put into stark relief. More importantly, they realised that, without a more representative management structure they would make similar mistakes.  The business case for diversity had become clear and the rest of the session was put to productive use developing a central and local diversity policy, strategy and engagement approach which owed much to a loaf of bread!

If you want to find out more about the EIMD (a not for profit organisation founded in 1996, with headquarters in Barcelona and which operates across the European Union), take a look at their website http://www.iegd.org/englishok/who.htm

Or feel free to drop me a line and I’ll tell you more about this and similar stories.

Ian@by2w.co.uk

I recently met the Marketing and Brand Director of a very well known (thanks to their quirky advertising strategy) but struggling (possibly also due to their quirky advertising strategy) telecomms brand.

Needless to say they have been wrestling with employee brand engagement for some time and although they reeled out the “our greatest asset” clichés, they also spoke about their internal culture as if the employee demographic was loitering by the bus stop with contraband fags and cider.

The corporate HQ had a frankly schizophrenic feel full of jazzy gimmicks like “oh so witty” voicemail and Dali-esque interior design.  It was certainly matched by the surreal logic of the marketing team and their talk of “magic moments”.  In a market where even their owners confess to being baffled by their brand, the director answered my question about what an engaged employee looked like with a remarkably casual “oh we’ll know one when we see one.”

I tried but I couldn’t see the tv cameras in the Board room and I swear I’ve rarely spent a more baffling hour and half.  The brand engagement strategy was so baffling I half expected the CEO to waltz through the room in his birthday suit, leap over his stretch goals and reveal his burning platform.

Why, oh why do so many leaders persist in believing that the art and science of engaging customers with brand is the same as engaging employees with it?

Customers seemingly crave fantasy as part of the purchasing process.  As gurus like Seth Godin or Phillip Kitchen remind us, convention dictates that the stories marketers relay to the market about products, services and brands are laced with illusion to such an extent that customers don’t just expect magic dust sprinkled over the marketing mix, they demand it.

Employees, however, have a very different, much more intimate relationship with the brand.  They not only demand but need sincerity and authenticity. They have an intrinsic understanding of the values underpinning the culture (whether officially sanctioned or not). They largely reject and often subtly undermine communication which is not in touch with this reality.  They’re a tough and demanding audience, particularly for leaders who are so blinded by notions of the aspirational culture that they overlook and underestimate the prevailing culture. 

By all means ensure that employees are aware of and are even excited by the new ad campaign or better still embrace storytelling as an engagement advice. But don’t forget that it isn’t just Seth Godin who believes that all marketers are liars.  Internal marketing campaigns, glitzy launches and suave internal PR may serve a purpose but cynical modern employees, in the words of rap pioneers Public Enemy’s Flava Flav simply “don’t believe the hype”. True and lasting engagement can only be built (and please pardon the pun) from the bottom up

So the next time someone makes the smart suggestion that they can align the employees behind the brand strategy with a video and supporting powerpoint slides, please remember to point out that office lighting is fairly unforgiving.  And who in their right mind would want to be an internal marketer, today’s naked Emperor?

These are complex corporate times but as the fingers of blame for the global economic downturn have been pointed at various external stakeholders, it’s interesting to hear the term “culture” creeping into the post mortem about the banking sector.

I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the growing abuse of the term performance culture within performance management parlance.  For me this phrase has become inextricably linked with the drive for delivering shareholder value in quarterly increments and the “up or out” mentality which has spilled over from investment banking.

But where does this leave the zealots now that a number of the investment banking super-tankers have holed themselves on the reefs of greed, selfishness, arrogance and some fairly suspect practice? It’s time for a fundamental re-think. The infrastructure underpinning many employment brands is clearly in need of a dramatic overhaul.

The current witch hunt for high profile scapegoats amongst the executive leadership cadre may “give good headline” but this sideshow threatens to distract from the core issues. Controversially I would go so far as to suggest that the culture problem is a widespread issue every bit as serious as the accusations of systemic racism levelled at the police force back in the 90s. Arguably this crisis will have even more far reaching consequences.

Far from being advocates of what have often been derided as “nice to have” initiatives, in these tough times, organisation development should be prioritised as part of the recovery process and OD professionals should be leading the revolutionary line. The time has come for comprehensive internal reviews followed by an energetic re-positioning of the vision, mission and values and associated people processes within many of our leading brand names.  This should be the first step towards a re-framing of the definition of performance in the context of the employer or employment brand

This is a complex issue but consider for a second the long established theory that an individual is at their most effective within a role some 2.5 years into the job. Or reflect on the equally established best practice that leaders should spend most of their first 100 days listening and gathering information. Contrast this with the notion of “hitting the ground running” and the obsession with quarterly shareholder reporting and year on year incremental targeting regardless of conditions. Mixed messages?

It seems a little old fashioned in these high octane times but there’s sound logic underpinning leadership best practices which call for considered, well paced decision making based upon an understanding that the decision makers will still be around when the impact of their decisions come to fruition.

Bankers, for example, used to be remunerated on the basis of loyalty bonuses and benefits packages at preferential rates.  Not so long ago, any posting on a c.v. revealing tenure in a role of under three years was viewed with suspicion.  Lift the drains on the recent recruitment drive amongst the retail banking sector and you will be greeted by whole teams made up of job-hopping former investment bankers.

Of course the flipside of low employee turnover includes problems with innovation, pace and inertia. But inertia and stability are two very different things.  The latter was once a highly prized commodity even in important parts of the investment market but was derided by the “short termists”. What wouldn’t shareholders now give for even incremental returns on their investments?

Those in the know suggest that many of the high profile leaders who will be appearing in committees over the next few months have been off the record advocates of culling grey hair in their staff ranks.  What price wisdom now?

Don’t get me wrong.  I very much believe in the notion of a culture of performance.  That’s why we’re all in business after all.  I just don’t believe in the notion of winning at all costs.

I’m realistic enough to understand that sustainability, network building and relationship development are the bedfellows of integrity, accountability, security and trust (the values, ironically, most popularly used to advertise the wares of financial services companies). I’m certainly not calling for a complete return to the old hierarchies and command and control regimes but it’s clear that there’s going to have to be a large dose of mature,“back to the future” thinking if the nirvana of an appropriate and  authentic performance culture is ever going to be achieved by arguably our most influential businesses and brands.

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Ian is the author of Brand Engagement: How Employees Make or Break Brands

 www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=281268

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is an organisation development process or philosophy that engages individuals within an organizational in its turnaround, renewal, change and focused performance.

It’s a particular way of asking questions and envisioning the future that fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, a situation, or an organization. Put another way, it’s an approach that believes in the power of positive thinking and seeks to draw out the superhero in every employee rather than a self-fulfilling belief that all employees are scheming super villains.

Used effectively, it enhances an organisation’s capacity for collaboration and change.  It’s a fantastic way of signaling an energising alternative to the depressing and draining, downsizing mentality of a recession.

Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a cycle of 4 processes focusing on:

1. DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well.
2. DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.
3. DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
4. DESTINY (or DELIVER): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

Even the headings are inspirational.

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than just trying to fix what doesn’t. It is the opposite of problem solving. Instead of focusing on gaps and inadequacies to find blame and remediate skills or practices, AI focuses on how to create more of the occasional exceptional performance that is occurring (and there will be examples), regardless of conditions, because a core of strengths is aligned.

The approach acknowledges the contribution of individuals, in order to increase trust and inspire best practice. The method aims to create meaning by drawing from stories of concrete successes with the potential of becoming best practices and lends itself to cross-functional social activities. It can be enjoyable and natural to many managers, who, let’s face it, are often sociable people when they come out from behind the badge.

There are a variety of approaches to implementing Appreciative Inquiry, including mass-mobilized interviews and a large, diverse gathering called an Appreciative Inquiry Summit Both approaches involve bringing very large, diverse groups of people together to study and build upon the best in an organization or community.

The basic philosophy of AI is also found in other positively oriented approaches to individual change as well as organizational change. AI fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, or a situation. The idea of building on strength, rather than just focusing on faults and weakness is a powerful idea in use in mentoring programs, and excellent performance evaluations – where superheroes come into their own.

If you’re wondering what to do with your employee survey and are a little nervous about how any internal benchmarking activity will be received; if you’ve had enough of the pessimism and would like to know more about the power of Appreciative Inquiry or just need a hand spotting those brand champions quietly battling the economic doom and gloom, get in touch. We’re happy to share ideas.

ian@by2w.co.uk