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Narrate Consulting |
At Narrate, we improve organisational communication - meaning greater innovation, lower staff churn, improved employee performance, reduced absenteeism, better customer service and more...We are a company focused on creating healthier working environments through better communications. We work with large, diverse organisations who have a problem with a workforce that doesn't understand or buy-in to the company's direction. It's also not unknown to find a board not pulling in the same direction - we've worked through that too.
What we do is bring our deep thinking about communication, story, narrative, shared understanding and how we think and behave to the issues - but in ways that are practical and grounded. We are constantly looking to challenge and improve our understanding of how people work - and so we focus on the most effective techniques, not based on out-dated ideas, hierarchy and dogma to get results. |
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Welcome to Narrate
Tomorrow
should see the publication of Melcrum's Practitioner's Guide to
Employee Engagement - in which I've contributed the chapter on using
stories and narrative. It's been an interesting experience - having
abandoned the attempt to fit a gallon into a pintpot early on, I aimed
instead to convey the complexity (sic) and excitement of the issue and
some hints of different approaches - only the readers can judge my
success. I also wanted to avoid too strong a focus on "storytelling" - as I say in the introduction to the chapter Storytelling
is a misnomer. It conjures up the image of a passive audience sitting
listening to someone with the charismatic, persuasive power to entrance
them. It revolves around a carefully-constructed story designed to
carry you out of the day-to-day to somewhere else and change your
thinking while you're there. What is on offer here is
more powerful and more positive than that simplistic view. And while it
involves storytelling throughout, some of the greatest opportunities
for employee engagement lie in listening to stories, not telling. The
real power and opportunity for using stories in organisations is in
listening to stories, helping others to create their own authentic
stories and making sense of the stories told. Even
that, however, proved problematic. One of the points that I focus on
early in any change workshop or project is that employee engagement and
culture change do not fit straightforward, 12-step projects. And "best
practice" varies - what works in one organisation will not produce the
same (or, on occasion, even similar) results in another. The
editors - generous in their comments and advice - wanted something
simple that anyone could pick up and put into practice. For me, it
felt like the Mullah Nasruddin story that Dave Snowden references here (about 2/3rds of the way down the post). I've always liked it, but now see exactly how a propos it is. In
the field of communications, I've often felt we do ourselves
disservices by dumbing down. Sometimes we need to stretch to reach
that bit further. Stretch our minds in particular... Technorati tags: melcrum, employee engagement, storytelling, dave snowden, internal communications
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How highly do you rate changing your organisation? It's
a topic that I've been thinking on recently because of what appears to
be an increasing trend of making change/leadership/innovation teams the
province of either short-term appointments or steady-as-she-goes
staff. Bright and challenging staff seem to be getting appointed to
day-to-day operational roles. While I think it's encouraging
that organisations think this way, I'm deeply concerned about the
quality of people in change teams particularly. Every team works best
with a balance of talents and skills - as the original Belbin model
recognised, without boxing people into single roles. Change and
leadership - in current thinking - demand new ways of approaching
problems, new ways of acting and the imagination and faith to try new
techniques without being able to predict the final outcomes precisely.
While it's always good to have some detail people and some
completer/finishers, the drive has to come from other types -
innovators, intelligentsia, people willing to try new perspectives. There
are, of course, exceptions, but look at your change team (or yourself,
if you're leading change). How strong is the tendency to follow
established processes? To take calculated risks? To be imaginative?
To keep your head down? To need to keep control over every element?
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Another PR survey - this time from Office Angels reported on the yearning for the return of the tea trolley. The Guardian article is nearer the mark, but still misses something. The
drive for efficiency and perfect accounting for time is a constant
anachronism - and far too much attention goes there, with added
implications that activities like lunchbreaks and socialising were
wasting time or somehow detrimental to the organisation. It's often
the implication that a work contract indicates a straight exchange of
salary for workhours, and that any hours used at work for non-efficient
work purposes is time stolen from the organisation. A very dangerous
mindset to get into - and one that I've challenged more than a few
times at conferences (typically, someone talking about email and spam
and how many hours can be saved, with a spurious figure of what that
means on the bottom line. Spare me.) I remember the tea trolley
at Racal, back in the 1980s when I was testing radar systems. It was
actually a very useful social space - a specified point in the day
when a bunch of people from different areas and specialisms met and
talked as we waited to buy anything that I'd probably not allow my
children to have today. There's a serious denigration of such
social spaces these days, usually on efficiency or bottom-line grounds
but (as in the case of smoking rooms) health ones too. The value was
in building cross-functional networks and communication channels and
talking in non-formal environments. And non-policed too, which made
them more powerful for sharing problems or warnings of potential future
issues. There's a good argument that properly implemented social
media tools can start to create virtual versions of these workspaces,
but I'm skeptical: most social media tools are still being implemented
with a lot of control or, at best, monitoring in place which will drive
difficult communications elsewhere. And I still believe that physical
spaces are better for much of this than virtual ones - trust and
believability are crucial elements and can be better picked up with
non-verbal cues, making the relationship-building quicker and more
durable. I'm also biased in favour of retaining
social/socialising as part of the workspace. Quite apart from the
benefits for the organisation, I believe it's an essential part of
being human. For me, leaving my previous employer and working on my
own in 2000 was difficult above all because of the sudden lack of a
social dimension to my work. So tell me, is it really that bad -
if the smoking room, the tea trolley, the staff canteen (and lunch
hour) are all disappearing, where do we meet other parts of the
organisation except in meetings? |
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