What does Bridge Training and Events do?

We are employee engagement and culture specialists, so we work with small-to-medium to large companies, about understanding what their brand promise is, so the promise that they put out through all of their marketing activity, whether it be through people or through websites. Understanding what the DNA that sits inside that promise and then we translate that into an internal employee campaigns to communicate that culture for the organisation that is representing the brand – I think what underpins everything that we do is ultimately creating a better customer experience, and having better customer service emanating from the organisations.

How integral is employee engagement for workplace culture, in your experience?

Totally integral, I mean happiness breeds happiness. And we’re not just talking about happiness from the sense of smiling all the time. What we also look at is behaviourist, so we utilise a lot of behavioural science which is truly beginning to understand where or how happiness impacts us, both from a cultural or social point of view, but it’s also part of the safety mechanisms of our brain, when we are feeling comfortable and secure in the environment in which we co-exist with others, that is really what we call building a better community. And within that community we build, our power therefore emanates outwardly. It’s almost as though we started this journey looking at the brand promise and how employees integrate with that, but now we’re beginning to see how employees actually drive it from within and become part of the brand promise.

And I think that’s where Bridge really stands out – we really get inside the matrix that is human behaviour. And there is nothing new. Fashion is not new, its recycled; human behaviour is not new. People behave in a similar way whether they’re working in a hospital or working in a hotel – our job is to find the commonality of the way people respond to their environment in which they exist in, and how they co-exist with others. And also how they represent that at the coalface to the customer – the customers are everybody, customers aren’t just paid, customers are employees, customers are each other. So when you really look at people, it’s not that hard – it’s all just people trying to get by.

Why is workplace culture so important to understand? Especially for people who work in internal communication, or in very small teams?

I started this genre of my career 20 or so years ago, and we used to get told people are the most important asset in your business, and they are. We look at brand from a behavioural point of view, but brand is represented in our right brain, we have relationships with brands – we love brands, we hate brands, we argue with brands. So when we look at the relationship between people and brand, brand does not exist, it’s a virtual world. And it is only a representation by the people inside it, driving it, because we’ve had brands that have fallen based on lack of innovation. We get this mystical confusion in our brain that brands exist, but brands are only a by-product of the people that are driving it from within. So therefore the workforce culture is the brand. We just have mixed it all up and thought brands were something virtual: no, brands are what man creates. Man exists in the workforce culture; therefore, brand is human. That’s why workforce culture is so important – because that is everything that drives a brand, because a brand is virtual and needs to be propelled by energy. Its people that have the energy.

Does the issue of trust feature extensively in your work?

Trust is an interesting word because it’s human behaviour. What creates trust, what drives trust, what is the impact of lack of trust? When we look at the relationship between two people, say in a marriage bound relationship or a romantic relationship, trust is the foundation that keeps the relationship together. Well that relationship, that word, is equally as impactful with employees and their organisation. You’ve got to trust your manager to do the right thing, you’ve got to trust your business to connect its higher purpose to continue on that higher purpose. Trust is a massive word to understand the impact that people have because when it’s there, it creates greatness.

What is the Bridge approach to improving communications in branding or in business?

I think we need to create a continuous brand to our workforce population. It needs to be simplified, it needs to speak the language of the people, it needs to be motivational. It’s the number one issue that we find in every orgasnisation that we’ve gone into is lack of internal communication. When we do our employees surveys, that generally rates in the top three as things they would like to have improved. Because again, when we are thinking about the brand in a humanistic way, the brand has to have a voice and it has to speak to its people the same way a parent speaks to its children. If a parent speaks to its children in a fragmented, broken or negative way, or not all, then how does that bond between parent and child exist? And then how will that child develop? There’s no difference between that, and the parent being the brand, and the children being the employees.

So how would you go about improving this fragmented or disengaged communication?

First we have to identify in the organisation, who is in control of internal comms? Because it kind of seems like it fell between two worlds: is it an HR thing, is it a manager thing, is it a marketing thing. But it also has to truly connect back to the values – what is the brand essence? Because once we get into the essence of the brand, then it should be in that how we communicate. But there are a lot of great new tools that are out. There’s a lot of employee engagement tools, we’ve introduced one called Jive which we’re working with, with one of our clients. So there’s a lot more availability of apps and tools that we can utilise, depending on the size of the population and the cost to the business. But its also just ensuring that there is interaction, that it’s a two-way street. Employees don’t just want to be talked at; they want to be talked with, and also talked back. It needs to definitely be a two-way communication.

What can communicators learn from the upcoming BridgeCon 2016?

What we’ve built within BridgeCon is a lot of case studies. So I think that’s really what delegates want to hear from – they don’t want to hear a bunch of consultants about their way of changing the world. It’s about really looking at organisation who have shown how they’ve done it. So we’ve got a great line-up of speakers, from a really good cross-section. And that’s really what it’s all about – it’s about understanding how people have done it, but we’ve also got a nice cross mix of having the ICS speaking, so we can look at the why we do this stuff, and then we’re looking at it from a case study perspective and that’s how we do this stuff. So we’re finishing off with a futurologist – their objective as a strategist is to predict the future so to speak, and trends in the current market place – but also where are we driving and going towards. It's primarily about looking at what we know now, but what can we predict going forward. 

BridgeCon 2016, employee engagement and workplace culture conference, takes place on 11/12 October. To book tickets, visit http://bridgecon2016.com/booking/