Prior to running a team day or three, it's worth knowing a little bit about motivation. The psychology is very interesting as we endeavour to run motivational team events.

Daniel Pink has conducted some fascinating studies indicating that (surprise surprise) its not all about money. People are strongly motivated by three key factors: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. So to get a great team event going, to hold an event with a great buzz, maybe it's worth thinking about these three factors.

Successful organisations win and retain key talent. Age is not a barrier to success; however, it may be a barrier to gaining and retaining the key talent from the next generation of movers and shakers.

Many organisations have already developed their culture and employment practices to gain and retain the best on offer. For example, many working parents now gain value from employer led initiatives in ways which go far beyond the statutory minimum requirements of the law. The benefits of this accrue to both employer and employee. In the same way, organisations should look at their culture and employment practices to ensure they gain & retain millennials. Organisations need people who are ambitious, educated and technologically “savvy”. So what are some of the challenges we face in getting the best from millennials?

Have you been here as well?

I'm sure you have heard of the saying 'If you carry on doing what you are doing, you will keep on getting what you are getting'.

Behind the scenes, L&D folk are masking the resistance, working miracles with slashed budgets, doing more and more internal delivery and covering the cracks of inconsistent internal messages from senior leaders delivered to the grass root business levels.

Is ROI really that important!?!

Measuring ROI allows a business to ensure its investments are sound. It’s not rocket science to know that if expenditure provides no returns, the business can identify this and react accordingly. In an ideal world, a comprehensive financial plan would be put together to predict return on investment allowing managers to justify a case for further spending. As a previous L&D manager I often found the biggest challenge was getting the business to understand that if everyone was working at full capacity, all doing what only they could do, then that was a good starting point! People not being utilised effectively, or staff being unskilled, reduced the potential of any return because the investment was starting with an un-achievable perspective!

The difficulty lies in being able to make the training budget work and knowing how to prove that training is effective. I found the problem occurs when you try to measure L&D benefits in a purely financial model; which got me thinking - instead shouldn't we be looking at other ways of measuring ROI which can be used in the same way for similar benefits? We don’t do an ROI analysis on office furnishing spend, although furnishing an office is often a huge cost. Maybe there are other ways of looking at ROI for topics such as L&D, office infra structure and other similar areas which support the working environment as a whole.  

This lead me to ask the question, "What does ROI actually mean?"

The Majorcan Government recently legislated to reduce “unregulated” accommodation to support the regulated hoteliers. An unintended consequence of this has been restaurants & bars losing significant trade during this holiday season.

The Government now has to live with the unintended consequences of its policy including for example less tax revenues & more unemployment.

This had me thinking about the unintended consequences of significantly reducing Training spend during difficult trading times. 

Developing and demonstrating talent is a key part of our individual happiness, and the workplace is of course the most common environment to focus on our key areas of talent. We expect to achieve results at work, and the ideal is when we can fully use talent to enable those results.

Often in the workplace we find ourselves doing things we are not particularly talented at, or perhaps don’t particularly like doing. Attending some of those meetings comes to mind as a common example! Or perhaps admin work, or performance management issues. The greatest buzz we can get is when our full talent is used, stress seems to be more invasive when we are doing activities we are not particularly suited to or enjoying.

Viktor Frankl was a concentration camp survivor who became a psychologist and wrote the astounding book "Man’s Search for Meaning". I would personally put this book as one of the ‘must reads’, Frankl’s observation was that with a sense of meaning we can endure anything, without it we are lost.

Using Frankl’s principle, I would suggest we need a sense of meaning to achieve great results at work. This is more than a sense of purpose (after all, a sense of purpose could simply be “work hard and get my work done on time!!). Meaning is a sense of purpose along with a satisfaction that we meet our own personal values.

I am in a restaurant in Russia. (OK, I’m not, but imagine I am.) I hear arguing from a couple on a table behind me. I don’t speak Russian. I can’t see them. So, how do I know they are arguing?

Pace, tone articulation. 

Sound advice
When we have a job interview or an important business meeting what do we plan? We plan what clothes will be suitable and we know that what we are wearing can affect how comfortable and confident we feel, and therefore appear to others. We think about body language and how to use this to appear a certain way. We prepare what we will say because we know that using the right vocabulary will communicate exactly what we wish to. But how many of us think about the way in which we will speak the words? Are we aware of what tone of voice to use? Do we know that we can consciously adapt our voice to communicate so much more than the meaning of the words? 

Returnship programmes set to increase within the UK…

‘Returnship’ programmes are set to rise further into 2019 with the government having already invested £5million into them in the 2017 budget, and further investment in 2018. Returnship programmes haven’t been around for very long, having been first introduced in the US by Goldman Sachs in 2008, the first UK schemes were only launched in 2014. 

Some of us use a communication App called WhatsApp, it’s a cool tool because you can set up friendship groups for swapping comments / messages. In our family, which is dispersed across the planet, we have a few of these groups going. One for recipes for Indian cooking, one for photos of family events etc. One of the groups we entitled ‘Bizarre Stuff’. It started out as a group to share amazing things we find out, such as discoveries by the Hubble telescope, developments in medicine etc. Over the last year most comments in that group have been about Donald Trump.

Most people I know, and me personally, abhor what he seems to stand for. But I’d like to tap briefly into what he seems to be good at.