Why battery farming employees is killing your business.

Yes this is a picture of a seemingly naked man with chickens. Why, you may ask. Well, am not sure about the lack of clothes and have my fingers crossed that the bubble coming out of his mouth does not contain some expletives but I wanted a picture to represent the battery farming of employees’.

A friend confided in me the other day about his job (let’s call him Sid) and how it the company he was working for had decided to deal with the current economic changes. Sid mentioned that like many organisations in the current climate, his were trying to cut spending;  they merged with another organisation, froze pay, and cut costs. Nothing new there unfortunately, but the thing that shocked me the most was the other conditions that he was working under:

Being kept in the dark- Employees  at his organisation were not informed of decisions that affected them. They were given very little notice when the company merged and some of the staff were told the week before Christmas that a letter would arrive on Christmas Eve letting them know if they had a job or not.

No basic rights – New rules came into play if you are sick, you lose pay for the days that you miss and you will receive £30 fines if you are 10 minutes late for work no matter how late you stay in the evening. New responsibilities are added to their jobs, without consultation, and they are told do it or lose your job.

No room to grow/develop - Not surprising, what was originally an environment for productivity, creativity and laughter has now been replaced by fear, stress and doing only what you need to do. Sid’s colleagues are scared to say or do anything for fear of losing their jobs. 

Obviously, this is only one side of the story and yes, companies are having tough times but there are things that you can do even when times are tough to improve the way you work and become sustainable.

How to free range your employees

Ask for help and listen - Each year this organisation would make thousands of brochures that no one ever used.  In Sid’s office alone, the cost for this ran into 5 figures, enough to pay for a person for a year. As someone on the front line, he knew what was working and what wasn’t. Let’s imagine that each employee would have at least one idea to cut costs or improve productivity, what could that do to transform an organisation?

Collective growth – Apologises for continuing with the chicken analogy but people, like chickens, are sociable, intelligent animals which need to be free and grow. By giving them space to collaborate, to jointly solve problems and build a workplace that is strong enough to overcome problems will improve moral, create a stronger culture and create ownership.

Be open – Even after all of the above has been taken into consideration, there still might be a need to make difficult decisions but do it openly, by involving  your employees.

We are in the 21^st not the 19^th Century but some practices are very antiquated and until companies make changes it will destroy their business.

Please feel free to share and post some of your stories or companies that are behaving badly or those that are being really innovative with their employees. By Mellissa Norman

Picture by @modalaci some rights reserved. 

Battery Farming employees is killing your business

BEYOND THE PITCH – Top tips on how to increase your Business sales 7TH JULY - SOHO

PREVIOUS WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS HAVE INCLUDED; PRELOADED, DISNEY, BBC, BAFTA, TWOFOURDIGITAL, NIXONMCINNES, TYNESIDE CINEMA, YIPP FILMS, ILLUMINA, COGAPP, KEO FILMS.

Pitching is only one 7th of the process that you will go through with clients to win business. Learn the other 6 steps to:

 Increase your incoming business.

 Overcome the ‘don’t have the budget’ objection, without lowering your fees.

Cut the time it takes to make a sale.

Where -www.01zero-one.co.uk in the heart of Soho

When - July 7th  9.30-5.30pm

                                               Price- £300 early bird discount before 24th June, £395 afterwards. (Price includes tasty grub.)

  Click here to read reviews from previous workshops     

 Who is it for? ‘Beyond the Pitch’ is for you if you have to pitch, write proposals or approach new clients. You are an accountant director, sales director or company owner who is responsible for business development or a creative who is involved in the pitch process. This is a tailored workshop to sharpen your skills and take you from good to great.    Book now for Beyond the Pitch

Beyond the Pitch’ is specially designed for our industry enabling you to increase the value of the business you can bring in and reduce the time it takes to do so. Most pitching workshops just focus on the pitch itself and the time you spend in front of a potential client.  This is an intensive workshop, on the whole sales process, giving you the skills to sell ethically by focusing on your client’s needs. 

This is a 1 day workshop that will limit your time out of the office. It is interactive so you will get chance to practice, ask questions and apply your learning to your day to day activities. We will also have some lovely food to fuel your brain cells. 

 By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

 Apply a ‘7 stage sales framework’ to your business development activities to increase turnover

 Apply the sales process to face to face meetings, phone calls and digital platforms.

 Understand how to deal with objections and difficult clients

 Learn the different ways of improving sales, and building a lasting relationship with your client.

Mellissa Norman - Mel has worked in traditional and digital media over 16 years and won the ‘Socially Responsibly’ category, part of the 360 degree competition at MIPtv. She has also worked as a sales consultant with over 50 different companies including BBC, Npower, NixonMcinnes and Business in the community to develop their ethical sales and business development process.

Mel recently directed Social Media Week in London, with over 110 events along with partners Nokia, Microsoft and Market Sentinel; We are Social, Brightlemon and Propel amongst others.  Mel has been trained as a trainer and tends not to use jargon and big words for things that are, in fact, quite simple.

Press here for more info

 Book now for Beyond the Pitch

What can Socrates teach us about Social Business?

As well as being immortalised as the guy with the beard on ’Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ We all know Socrates is a Greek philosopher but what is less known is that his innovative approaches are still making a mark in today’s digital world.

As I was writing this blog I researched some links and noticed a few other blog posts looking at Socrates and how his thoughts can be applied to Social Media.  For this blog I wanted to focus on  ‘social business’ instead which can also learn something from his methods.

His main technique was not to give the answers to his pleading students and followers but to ask them questions instead. He found that they learnt more this way. Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others."  In face his methods were so powerful that he was reportedly sentenced to death for ‘corrupting the youth’. Luckily for a lot businesses today Hemlock has gone out of fashion and we as a society, we have embraced his ideas and are implementing them more than ever.

Socrates’s inventive questioning methods can be used today in as a device for building social businesses. Here are 3 ways that it can impact and improve your collaborative business:

Innovation has been described as improving product, service or business model   . Due to the current climate companies are being more proactive with innovation, rather than wait till business starts to tail off many are now thinking how can they do things differently?

 Innovation starts with either a dissatisfaction or a motivation often with a question;   ‘What if…?’ ‘How could we improve our service if we could ….?’  ‘How can we redesign ‘this’ for the 21^st century?’  This is a process you can do with both your employees and your customers. User-centred design has been common for a number of years in certain sectors of the business world and increasingly is going mainstream. Don’t wait till things stop working, continuously think how you can make your business better. 

CRM: There is a lot of very good bloggage about brands listening to their customers, finding out what they want, what they are not happy so I am not going to go into a lot of details here about that. It is common knowledge that a good social CRM strategy can uncover  & resolve problems quickly,  find positives, what is working well and what is not working.  However, an even braver but effective way you can work with your customers is by asking the questions up front  ‘How can we do better?’ .'Tell us about your experiences with our company..’  Being open enough to ask for the good, the bad and the ugly, if the proper processes are in place, can really improve the way your business works.

Business strategy - What is less often talked about is how to listen to your employees and create a collaborative business strategy. Building environments both on and off, asking the right questions, can enable your organisation to work more effectively

Just like Socrates, who believes ‘I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.'  Smart CEO’s and Managing  Directors are beginning to realise this and are seeking answers by asking questions to their employees as well as their customers as the knowledge and problem solving capabilities exist in every corner of their company.  Some of the companies that employ collaborative approaches include Ericsson, Cisco and Hewlett Packard.

Hand in hand with all questioning techniques  is active listening. There is little point asking questions if you are not listening. It sounds easy enough but anyone who has had to listen to a toddler for long periods of time knows how exhausting listening properly can be. What you are listening to is what is being said, how it is being said and what is not.  Employed together both questioning and listening can be a powerful twosome that can prolong the life of a company and make the old man with the beard proud. ‘Party on dudes!’

picture by Ian W Scott 

We are going to need a bigger board.

It has been nearly a month since Social Media Week has finished and the paperwork has been wrapped up, to do lists have been completed and we have already started thinking about next year.

Sam will be doing some serious data analysis on the results with his calculator and Sharpie fuelled by caffeine, cupcakes and retro sweets but I realised that I had not written a blog since Christmas so thought this was a perfect time to catch up and summarise the last few months.

In our second staff meeting of the year we starred at our Blue Peter style board (made by the lovely Lauren) and it became clear that SMW was going to be even bigger than expected.

It’s not that our estimates had been conservative, we had big plans for this year and hoped to achieve, in  four months,  50 events in total, five of our own, 45 with other event organisers, with 5,000 people attending throughout the week and we wanted to raise enough sponsorship to make it all free.

The end results blew us away and being a small team at Chinwag we literally could not have done it without all of you. Using the principles of Social Media only works if you have  a community of amazing companies and individuals, with oodles of passion and belief.

Overall there were 110 events, 12 designed by Chinwag and a whopping 95 created and delivered with love by our 54 event partners including Dell, Dutch Embassy, British Library, BBC, Channel 4,LikeMinds, Viadeo, We Are Social, techMAP,Ogilvy.

44% of events were put on by digital, traditional and social media agencies the rest were a variety of companies, organisations and individuals from all sectors.

8,500 tickets weresnapped up and with8,000 online viewers watching the livestream of the event. Social Media Week London (#smwldn) trended every dayon Twitter surfing the wave of tweets across all the events.

Event formats were more varied than ever from the traditional round table, panel discussions, networking events to alternative formats; unconferences, huddles, a pop-up farm and a pop-up shop.

Over 50 amazing venues across London generously donated space including Tate Britain, The Guardian, Design Council, Daily Telegraph, IAB, The Hub, HSBC, Wahaca,EHS 4D, TalkTalk as well as many more.

The topics covered ranged across a large selection of industries from music, games, mobile, public sector, broadcast, charity, museums & galleries, sport, radio, business, recruitment, journalism and theatre.

Throughout the week, our global and city sponsors Nokia performed random acts of kindness in London as well as other cities around the world giving out free phones and also tickets to sold out events. They were a fantastic city sponsor and were happy to get stuck in, contribute, share and enable connections across the week with#nokiaconnects. So a big thank you to them and our other sponsors, event partners, venues and media partners and all of you who participated creating the biggest SMW London to date!

We want to tell the full story of the week and we’d love to hear your stories and experiences, so together we can collectively document what happened. Tell us what you learnt, who you met, deals you did, what inspired you. It would be fantastic if you could share your with us and have the opportunity to win some lovely Kodak cameras with Share buttons!

Leave your stories in the comments below or email them to smw@chinwag.com, if you are feeling shy.

A collaborative Christmas

This Sunday I had the day off nursing a persistent cough. For the last few weeks I have been burying my head in the snow pretending that it is not Christmas. Realising I needed an attitude shift, I decided to watch ‘White Christmas’, the old Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye film from the 50’s to put me in the holiday spirit. A long standing phobia to musicals, based on a brief but terrifying pre-teen experience at my local theatre in Stevenage means I always fast forward through the musical numbers to focus on the story. As I watched Rosemary Clooney tap dance at high speed across the stage waving a feathered fan, my mind wandered.. For those of you who have forgotten the story. Bing and Danny decide to, in five days, to put on a show, in an ailing ski lodge to improve its takings after a snow drought. In order to make it happen, find the artists, get an audience, they used their networks, TV, phones, the resources of their time to put on a show of a life time.

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