Engaging for Success

I've just come back from a really inspiring session at Birmingham City Council House (what a beautiful building!) about employee engagement, organised by my good friend and poker buddy Raffaela Goodby. It was part of the Engaging for Success taskforce, which was launched by the Prime Minister earlier this year. The goal of the taskforce was first to research whether engagement can actually drive growth (they concluded it can) and then to engage employees throughout the British economy so that  our recovery is sustainable.
David MacLeod, who is chairing the engagement taskforce, introduced the session. David is brilliant; an entirely commercially-focused, people person. What he understands and communicates so well is that engagement isn't about some wishy washy 'make everyone happy' approach; it's about transforming the way businesses operate so they can grow and deliver more.
The aim of today was to bring engagement practitioners from public and private sector organisations together to discuss challenges and suggest solutions.
First, we had the opportunity to discuss the four enablers of engagement:

1. having a strong, strategic narrative (this is where we were and this is where we're going); 
2. engaging managers (because actually without them nothing can happen);
3. giving employees a voice (and then listening to them) and 
4. demonstrating integrity.

I heard some useful, practical tips on how to engage managers like measuring and benchmarking their engagement performance to engender a spirit of competition and, where personalities may find discussions about engagement difficult, presenting evidence and risk without forcing conclusions on people.
We also had the opportunity to discuss the engagement challenges in our businesses and where we think the taskforce should go from here (this was the first of 10 regional events across the country). I felt reassured to hear that other practitioners face similar challenges and it was incredibly useful to hear what practical stuff they're doing.
As always, the most useful bit was networking and meeting people who you can bounce ideas around with. It looks like the midlands engagement practitioners are going to carry on meeting quarterly, so if you want to join in or come along, follow Engage4Success on Twitter. All in all, a very good day - well done to the team from BCC for organising it so well.
(The video above is one that was showed today; it's used quite a lot but because it's so good at showing what great leadership is about.)
Sorry, correction, this is actually the video they showed:

Change of personnel in your comms team? Manage your social media carefully

Managing communications through a change of personnel so the service is seamless is incredibly difficult. New people have new ways of doing things and chances are that's why you've employed them - because you want something new. Managing social media through a change of personnel is even more difficult.
In managing social media for our organisations, we invest so much of our own personalities and often, at this stage of social media development, where it's not truly embedded in many organisations, a change of personnel can mean a total halt to social media activities.
Two recent examples I've spotted are Testway Housing and Housing Plus Group. Testway was the first ever housing association on Twitter and used to be on of my favourite examples. It tweeted several times a day with useful, often funny, information and news. It had worked hard to build genuine relationships with its thousand plus followers.
Then on 6 July 2011, its twitter personality changed: it started tweeting much less frequently and then between August - October, it only tweeted twice and hasn't tweeted at all this month. I'm aware they've had a change of personnel in their communications team and it may be that they're reconsidering their approach to social media overall and twitter specifically. But to the outside world, it would look a bit odd and like the account has been half-abandoned.

With Housing Plus, it has been on Twitter for a shorter time (since 21 January 2010) than Testway but has still built up a good 300 followers. It had been tweeting regularly but its last one was on 19 August this year. I know their communications team has had a reorganisation (one of whom, Christine Howles, will soon be joining my comms team at Wolverhampton Homes). It's a shame their hard work building the community will have been damaged by stopping so abruptly without explanation.

It's really difficult to avoid this happening when the people who leave are the ones who've been pushing social media. When people are new in post (or there isn't anyone in post), their head is often spinning just getting to know the organisation. Keeping all the balls in the air without dropping one is practically impossible. The risk is because social media isn't embedded it becomes the most droppable. But to tackle this, the business needs to have truly embedded the ethos of social media far beyond 'so and so looks after twitter'. It needs to carefully manage any changeover, even if the new people feel they want a new approach.
Some organisations have embedded it brilliantly. For example, Walsall Council. Dan Slee, one of their communications officers, does an awesome job managing their multiple social media presences. But from what I've read of the organisation, and its other employees that I know who are on social media, if Dan was to leave, their presence would continue. That is the level of embedded-ness that communications teams should be looking to establish - that social media bigger is than one person, that the organisation truly gets it and that the external reputation management is what guides them to make a seamless transition.

The conversation is the relationship

Last year I had some fab training as part of the Wolverhampton Homes leadership programme. It was about how to have 'fierce conversations' - conversations that are real and get to the heart of issues. (They mean fierce as in snap your fingers, dang, girl kind of fierce rather than grrrr fierce.)
I would really recommend the training company Fierce who delivered it; they have a great approach to improving organisational culture.
One of the key phrases they used was that 'the conversation is the relationship'. It's a phrase that has really stuck with me and that I often think about in my personal and work life.
What they mean is that without a conversation there is no relationship and the tone of conversation typifies the relationship.
I think that's so true - my best relationships are with the people I really talk to, listen to and share ideas with. My more challenging relationships are where the conversation has stopped (or everything that's being said is non-verbal) or one or both of us have stopped listening.
So I've got a question for you: who are you having a conversation with? And who are you not? And what impact is that having on your relationships?

Why the BBC's travel tweets are kinda beautiful

Do you follow @BBCtravelalert on Twitter? Or @BBCTravelScot? If not, you should do, even if you're not interested in travel news for London or Scotland, which, living in neither London nor Scotland, I am not.

You should follow them because they are beautiful examples of how twitter feeds about boring subjects can be funny, tender, engaging and interesting. They respond to their followers, retweet useful information, make jokes, have banter and generally make nightmarish commutes all the more bearable.

Here's some lovely examples:

And proving the theory that if you think something, somebody else will have thought the same and probably will have blogged it already, here's a post from Mark Shaw highlighting their good work too.

Best Practice: Bromford's No Postcodes

I saw a link for this video on Twitter and it's such a great example of innovation I had to share it. It was created by Bromford Support and aims to discourage young people from joining gangs and carrying knives. The video has interspersed footage of the Birmingham Riots with footballers and rappers saying 'no postcodes'. It is set to music and builds over the video - by the end the hairs on the back of my neck had stood up. Looking at it, I'm guessing it cost next to nothing to make, but it is incredibly powerful. It has already achieved more than 2,000 views on YouTube and this BBC coverage. Good work Bromford.