What’s your hidden talent?

It’s that time of year again where hopefuls from all over the UK seek fame and success on our televisions. With the rise in the popularity of talent contests such as Britain’s Got Talent and The Voice it has led us to the question – what is our hidden talent? The skill that we once acquired along the way but currently neglect to make use of or perhaps something that we don’t personally recognise as a valuable skill to have.

As an employer you need to ensure that you are bringing the best out of your staff. Not only will utilising and developing the talent that they already possess benefit them, but it could improve your business. The key is to know your workforce, what they might not consider as useful skills or knowledge could be just what you’re looking for.

Now, we aren’t quite talking about the ability to street dance or knowing how to belt out a show tune (as entertaining as that may be in an office environment). It’s those secret talents, forgotten qualifications, personal interests and know how that might come naturally to some people that you can make use of. You could be surprised and impressed at what you actually find out about colleagues and hopefully uncover some transferable skills that can be applied in certain areas of business.

For example, you could be interested in using social media to generate good PR for the company and be just about to start an expensive recruitment campaign for a social media officer. A member of your workforce might be a self taught expert in using Twitter in their private lives or even in charge of social media for a local charity in their spare time. By knowing that these skills already exist in your workforce and being able to invest in them, then you can fine tune them to meet your business needs and even save time and money.

One way to find out what exactly your colleagues know is by conducting a skills audit. Not only will you be more aware of what extra talents are hiding amongst your staff, but you will be able to identify any skill gaps in your organisation and devise a training plan to resolve them. Also, if someone has knowledge in a different area to their current team this would also become clear during a skills audit and could result in potential savings.
Invest in the skills of your workforce and develop what you already have. By concentrating on what knowledge you currently hold as a company then you can focus your efforts more effectively. If you supply further training to perfect the skills of the staff that you already have then you also won’t waste resources unnecessarily hiring new talent in. For details on training courses available to help develop your business contact us.

Written by Meegan – www.bluewoodtraining.com – May 2012

There’s no room for ego in business

Businesses are made up of people and each of these has a unique personality, hopefully one that contributes to the success of the company they work for. Different personalities can bring a variety of skills to your workforce but it is important to recognise how each of these function and when a personality is getting in the way of work or becoming a liability. It’s good to identify the different personalities that make up your team and a course in people management can help make things easier.

When a personality starts hindering rather than helping a situation then you have a problem. Take the concept of ego for example. Some might say that an ego is healthy as it creates an air of confidence and brings a certain amount of success in business – if you look like you believe in yourself it is easier to convince others likewise. But it is when that ego becomes over-inflated or unfounded then it can be unhealthy.

It is thought that “fifty-three percent of business people estimate ego costs their company 6 to 15 percent of annual revenue; 21 percent say this cost ranges from 16 to 20 percent”. If an ego is left to run amok it can dominate business discussions and decisions and result in costing the company money or resulting in losing out of business in a worst case scenario. Similarly working for someone or alongside a team member whose ego needs a desk of their own is no fun, and so making sure you have the correct balance of personalities in your workforce is essential.

An example of an ego teetering on the verge of unhealthy is Simon Cowell. Fortunately for him at the moment his ego is what’s helping him make his fortune. By being a big personality who says what he thinks and believes he always knows best, he is cashing in on the love or hate me marmite element of his personality and it has even worked globally for Cowell. However, with recent scandal surrounding an unofficial book detailing personal information about his relationships, perhaps the price of having a big ego is evident when you take a look at his relationship history.

Clashes of ego’s are also to be avoided in business. Bands throughout history are notorious for splitting up due to “differences of opinion” which can also be read as a fight of egos – just take Guns and Roses or Oasis as good examples of too many egos in a small space. Public image is important if you are in a line of work that will be scrutinised. Controlling the wilder elements of your personal life and ego is essential if you are to remain in favour. Pippa Middleton is a recent example of someone adjusting to being in the limelight. Currently she is in trouble for hanging around with the wrong crowd which could attract negative attention for someone related to the royals. The fact she has made the Time magazine’s most influential people also shows this Middleton needs to tread carefully in order to attract the correct kind of publicity. If you’re new to the public eye and have recently found yourself in the limelight, Bluewood training can offer guidance so why not contact us?

Written by Meegan – www.bluewoodtraining.com – April 2012

Olympic Countdown

Some of Bluewood’s clients are official sponsors, some of our freelance trainers are going to be back at the BBC helping to get the vast amount of coverage onto our screens and even if you are a Londoner who’s planning on being out of the country this summer, you can’t afford to miss any opportunities for your brand during the Olympics.

The games will be huge for London and the UK, with; 26 sports, 205 competing nations, 10,000 athletes, 1 million tourists and 25,000 accredited media, there’s no denying the impact the event will have. While the 55 sponsors will get the majority of the branding during the games, there are still going to be many chances for businesses and organisations to boost their profile. However, while the potential benefits of getting involved will far outweigh them, being prepared for possible risks is vital; from ensuring your marketing team are fully versed on Rule 40 of the Olympic charter (covering the use of participants in advertising) to having your corporate messages up to scratch on; flexible working, security measures and any extra expenses you will have to budget for.

There’s no doubt that the media will be hungry for relevant stories (although PRs need to be careful to ensure they aren’t just forcing their stories to link into the games) – The Telegraph Group are planning at least 40 pages of Olympic coverage per day during the event – so this is going to be a valuable PR opportunity for organisations.

Of course it isn’t just the sports that journalists will be covering; the media will be looking at a range of other issues like travel and transport, security, money spent on the games as well as the wider economic effects for the UK. So making sure your spokespeople can handle questions on the specific issues you are involved with is vital, but don’t overlook the opportunities there will be for your team to be put forward as commentators on the wider topics too.

We all know that working and commuting in London during the Olympics will be a little more difficult than usual (especially in Canary Wharf!) but this will be a once in a lifetime event and you’ve got to be ready to grasp the opportunities.

Written by Will Edwards – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – April 2012

People Panic

We all know the importance of giving the public good advice in a crisis. If an issue is dealt with calmly then you might avoid a tense situation. Being prepared is half of the battle, with training on how to deal with a crisis you can go about your business knowing that if the worst should happen you have a plan. You’d think this would be a top priority of businesses and the Government alike, especially after last year’s riots spiralled out of control in the media. However, the petrol “shortage” recently hasn’t been helped by the panic created by the mixed messages given by those in charge.

Initially, the news broke as a precaution and the UK was informed that a fuel strike might be on the cards. Predictably this triggered a panic that saw consumers flying to the pumps and topping up unnecessarily. Prime Minister David Cameron advised Britain to “top up” when there was yet to be a strike even confirmed. Instead of acting to stop panic buying, Cabinet Minister Francis Maude told the public that drivers should store petrol “maybe a little bit in the garage as well in a jerry can” just in case.

The seriousness of this ill advice was then highlighted further when a woman from York was taken to hospital with 40% burns after an accident topping up a jerry can in her kitchen. Panic is in the human nature and matters were made worse when the Government missed important opportunities to get the situation under control. It is important to present a clear message and to stick with your point when speaking to an audience.

On a related note, the Oil and Gas industry is often regarded badly by the public possibly due to recent price rises, incidents and strikes. The industry’s trade association recognises the importance of good public relations as they are currently seeking to employ an agency to help them improve their image. The “Oil & Gas UK’s board believes that the industry is ‘widely misunderstood’ and ‘recognises that positive public perception can create “safe space” for politicians to make positive policy choices in relation to the industry’”. The public holds a lot of power and so maintaining a positive reputation can be in your favour. Taking time to train your staff in the basics such as Communications and Social media can transform opinions quickly and painlessly. Remember – people panic but in business you can’t afford to.

Written by Meegan – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – April 2012

Time to change?

It’s a good idea to constantly evaluate your business to make sure you’re offering best in class services. Whether this is through retraining staff, improving customer relations or keeping up with the latest technology…

An area that is easily improved, but often avoided or seen as confusing is social media. By using a combination of tools, you can reach a wide audience for relatively little cost. It’s better to be well informed before approaching a new venture so perhaps a social media training course could set you on the right path to success.

A new study into local councils use of social media found that not all local authorities were promoting the use of either Facebook or Twitter to reach their target audiences. Around 61 UK councils do not use it. Richard Stokoe, the London fire brigades Head of Communications said that councils weren’t stepping up to the call to improve online communications after last year’s riots “The interim report by [chair of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel] Darra Singh into the English riots in August specifically singled out local authorities as failing to use or understand social media. It is clear that despite these warnings there are many local authorities that have ignored this message. This isn’t a nice-to-have “add on” anymore. This is a crucial public safety and reassurance tool.”

However, some are using these tools effectively; Coventry City Council has the highest number of followers on Facebook and Twitter with 24,080 people showing an interest in their work. By being able to use this medium to get in contact with people councils are more likely to be aware of issues quicker and can create a more positive public profile for themselves with minimum effort. In cases like the London riots it could be used as a public reassurance tool, and failure to use these methods could put public safety at risk. On the other hand, poor use could also anger the public perhaps if they didn’t get a response to a tweet or post – so it’s important to keep an account up to date if you want it to work in your favour.

It has been suggested that private sector services may be more likely to use social media, Roy Poynter says “private companies are often happy with any new customers, the public sector are sometimes try very hard to reach the ‘right’ new customers. In the context of this difference, the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can be a double-edged sword”. If the public sector attracts the wrong sort of target audience through a social media campaign, time is used up dealing with these rather than those intended. For example the UK advisory service used social networking site Habbo positively in its “Talk to Frank” drug aware campaign, but some health campaigns are less successful as they attract “the ‘worried well’ rather than key ‘at risk’ groups. This means that staff are busy, people are coming through the doors, but the number of ‘at risk’ people seen can drop”.

If you’re unsure if social media is for you and want help developing your skills then get in touch with Bluewood Training.

Written by Megan – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – April 2012

The BBC on political interview gaffes

A good video of political gaffes on the BBC’s site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17433453

Present and Correct

One of the most important things to help make your presentation a success is confidence, which is of course what many of us are short of when we step into the spotlight.

We’ve taught thousands of individuals how to improve the way they present and we can safely say that there’s no such thing as a natural – some of us are better at it than others, but generally it’s hard work that makes the best performers LOOK like naturals. Winston Churchill is supposed to have spent 7 hours preparing every 40 minute speech he gave – the result was that he looked like a natural. A formal presentation training session is obviously a great way to help build your confidence, as we’ll give you the pointers, tips and techniques to help you understand what makes a great presentation, but it’s also about the opportunity to practice in front of camera (you can even do this at home in front of a mirror if, for example, time constraints mean that formal training isn’t an option for you). This practice helps you to test your content, or the notes you’ve written (we normally advise against having a full script, as it’s too tempting to just read directly from it), it helps you to become more familiar with it, thus being able to recite it, at least in part, and it also gives you the confidence that comes from trialling and preparing for being on stage.

So, apart from practise, what else can you do to ensure your presentation goes well? Recently Bob Geldof spoke at the SuperReturn conference in Berlin, where Bob spoke with gusto, for an hour, without using notes. He praised the positives of the private equity industry but also did his best to promote investment in Africa saying “I have learned that private equity, contrary to the Romney-esque debate in the United States at the moment, can be a major vehicle for positive change in this world”. Bob is chairman of a private equity firm, but he’s clearly still hugely passionate about Africa. If you can inject extra enthusiasm into your speech, it will up the tempo and help draw in your audience – if you seem bored or disinterested in your subject, you can’t blame your audience for being the same.

On the other hand, you can of course learn what not to do from some presenters too. Last week, reported as a ‘day of gaffes’ by Sky News, Sir Dave Richards, Premier League Chairman, managed to both embarrass himself and offend Fifa and Uefa, while making a speech at a sports security conference in Qatar. Sir Dave seemed to rant, saying; “England gave the world football” and even went so far as to exclaim; “For 50 years, we owned the game… we wrote the rules… Then, 50 years later, some guy came along and said you’re liars and they actually stole it. It was called Fifa. Fifty years later, another gang came along called Uefa and stole a bit more.” The fact is that these comments should probably have never seen the light of day, but most certainly not in front of an audience that were very unlikely to sympathise. As if that wasn’t enough, later on in the event, Sir Dave slipped and fell into a pool – probably another thing that he ought to have avoided!

Making presentations tends not to be an easy task, but with the right preparation and practise you can give yourself an excellent chance of success – and should you need formal training, we are, of course, very keen to help!

Written by Will Edwards – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – March 2012

What makes a good message?

When you take part in a media interview or give a presentation, it should be to get across a message, whether it’s about your new product, research, or to talk about a specific event (good or bad), but it has to be carried out to achieve something, otherwise what’s the point? You are there to; speak to your stakeholders, win clients, impress shareholders or push your agenda and even if you are just providing comment on an event, your underlying message ought to be ‘we are experts in this field’ so you should listen to/do business with us.

However, it’s no good deciding to go into an interview or presentation hoping to communicate an idea, unless you can support it with evidence and include a call to action. For example; saying ‘we are customer focussed’ is not really a message; in fact it’s a rather overused statement that most people who hear it will think is ‘just one of those things that companies say’.

What can you do to turn this into a real message? Firstly, ask yourselves if this is really what you want to communicate to your audience – if not then you need to work out what is. Secondly, it’s a phrase you hear a lot, so it has to be given some support; are there statistics, anecdotes or other pieces of evidence (e.g. 75% of our business is repeat customers) you can provide to prove this isn’t just another piece of marketing speak? Thirdly; ‘so what?’ You need a call to action, otherwise what do you want your audience to do with this message or idea (e.g. you want people to believe that you’re worth doing business with because the care and attention you give customers is superior to your competition).

Having a set of strong messages will also give you ‘safe territory’ to retreat to if you come under pressure in an interview or presentation. Then, if you lose your way, or find yourself being drawn into areas you don’t want to discuss, you know that you can get back to your messages and they will be compelling enough to pull the agenda back into your control.

One thing to keep in mind (particularly for a media interview); we are at the stage now where the word ‘message’ brings up too many reminders of bad political interviewees and slippery spin doctors, so we don’t advise using this word in an actual interview. Try using language like; ‘our ideas’ or ‘the main issue for us’. Also; the word is a little too much like PR jargon and it’s best to steer clear of ‘company speak’ when engaging with external audiences.

So how do you successfully deliver these messages? That’s where our media training and presentation training courses come in, but once you’ve put together three strong ideas, each with evidence and a call to action, that’s going to be a lot easier.

Written by Will Edwards – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – February 2012

Hash-tag high-jack

McDonalds has publicly come under attack recently when a promotional Twitter hash-tag they created to promote fresh produce got high-jacked. Anti McDonalds Tweeters accused the chain of “making customers vomit, serving pig meat from gestation crates and dishing up a burger containing a finger nail”. Rick Wion, social media director said that “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course”. The McDonalds team were also quick to act when a hoax poster was shared on Twitter, which suggested that they were charging an ‘additional fee’ to African-American customers. Wion said that “Our strategy was to set the record straight, then through the next two days reaching out to people we saw posting the picture and continuing to inform them”. The key is not to avoid social media in case something bad happens, but to plan for what to do if it does. Do your social media or press team need refresher crisis training?

Another company suffering from bad press recently were O2, who it was revealed last week were sending customers mobile numbers to every website they visited using the O2 network on their smartphones. This means that personal details could be used without permission. The company with 22 million UK customers took to Twitter to say that it was looking into the matter and even exceeded its daily tweet allowance trying to reassure the public.

James Paterson, PR and social media campaigns manager said that O2 did ““not stay quietly in [its] shell” as news circulated about the data leaks and that the company employed a strategy immediately to respond to user questions and communicate that it was investigating the issue”. He went on to say that they wanted to directly get back to as many as possible “In the past we may have just given a Q&A to the well-known media outlets, but our people understand that if you answer queries and communicate to people on social media straight away, problems tend to be resolved more quickly”. The office of the Information Commissioner is currently investigating the privacy breach “We will now speak to O2 to remind them of their data breach notification obligations, and to better understand what has happened, before we decide how to proceed.” Crisis management is about updating the public regularly and reassuring them that the problem will be resolved. It is important to keep your plan updated and it seems that O2’s plan is in place.

Things like this can happen; people have their own opinion and have the power to voice it to the world via social media. If something like this happens to your company it is important to deal with the situation unfolding quickly and calmly to avoid as much negative press as possible. Of can course, Bluewood Training can help your team to prepare and keep a cool head in a crisis.

Written by Megan – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – February 2012

Learning from the medical profession in crisis communications

Recently the French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) have come under criticism for apparently using a material found in mattresses in their breast implants. The French authorities decided to advise that patients have the implants removed immediately as they were in danger of them bursting. The rumours quickly sailed across the channel with 40,000 women in the UK being affected and it caused a media frenzy. Conflicting advice left thousands of customers confused and panicking that they were in danger. In the immediate aftermath of a crisis it is important that you try and save some of your reputation by dealing with it clearly and efficiently, this is one of the key things that we teach in our media crisis training.

There was a debate about who would foot the bill and the NHS said they will remove and replace implants that were affected. However not all patients that went privately have had the same help. Women who used the firms Transform, the Harley Medical Group and Surgicare have been informed that they will not be offered free replacement despite the government reminding them that they have a moral obligation to their customers.

Pregnant Asha Rama-Rabone has been a victim of the confusion “Nobody seems to know what the risks are. I’m watching the news for new revelations each day but different experts keep saying different things. It is a total nightmare.”

The Royal College of Surgeons has produced a document in an attempt to clear up confusion. Consultant plastic surgeon Tim Goodacre, head of professional standards at BAPRAS, said: “It has been a distressing time for all the women caught up in the PIP breast implant issue. We hope this comprehensive guidance, for both patients and healthcare professionals, will ensure we can conclude this effectively and with compassion. We must now look at how cosmetic products and interventions are regulated in the UK more broadly so that we can avoid a repeat of this scenario.”

Women seeking advice have had to wait weeks for guidance. The Independent Healthcare Advisory Services (IHAS) director Sally Taber says, “With the current government position remaining unclear, patients want to know the timeline for the further investigations into PIP implants by the MHRA.”. There is now a government review taking place into the PIP crisis led by Sir Bruce Keogh. It has been suggested that a new insurance scheme (like we have for travel insurance) could come in to prevent such a panic happening again “One of the things my review will be looking at will be… something like the Abta arrangement, which means that when a company runs into trouble for whatever reason, the consumer is covered.”

It seems that the unclear guidelines from the professionals at the start caused worry and confusion to thousands and this stress would’ve been avoided had they got some crisis management in place. Private surgeries will now have a lot of negative feelings towards them and will no doubt feel the blow. So get prepared and invest in some crisis management – you don’t have a crystal ball so get a good plan behind you.

Written by Megan – www.bluewoodtraining.co.uk – January 2012