Corporate wellness has proven to be a hot topic with many of you, and one of our contributing experts in this area is Rob Woollen, who has leant his knowledge to articles including Cutting the cost of wellness as well as manging our Wellness/wellbeing at work discussion group.

Rob's presently running a survey to find out how relevant HR professionals think wellness is, why they consider it important (or not) and what barriers they have come up against in implementing wellness schemes. A prize of a free Nintendo Wii is up for grabs for one lucky participant.

Click here to take part in the survey.

Rob has kindly offered to exclusively detail the results of the study on HRzone.co.uk - so watch this space.

As I said in my last post, courageous and thoughtful leadership is critical during this time of fear among the workforce. I’m encouraged that so many company leaders I speak with regularly are continuing and even increasing their investment in employee recognition programs as a way to replace fear with appreciation, focus and determination (results born out in our recent market research study).

The intranet currently forms an integral part of the internal communication strategy in most organizations as an information provider and collaboration tool. But social media also allows collaboration, dialogue, documentation and much more, at a lower cost and with much less back-end work involved. What does the future hold for the much-loved intranet? Can it survive in a world of tweets, wikis and all-singing all-dancing social networking platforms?

Some worry about the openness of social media and miss the ‘closed space’ old-school intranets provided. However, far from killing off the intranet, social media might just be what saves all that ‘field of dreams’ content and technology investment from going to waste. Social media sites have provided the option to be active rather than passive consumers of information. Isn’t this engagement just what most organisations (and their intranets) need right now?

Read the full debate on Melcrum’s Internal Comms Hub: http://tinyurl.com/CH-intranet

Thriving during this recession and positioning your organization to gain competitive advantage and market share when the upturn comes requires courageous and thoughtful leadership now. It is no secret that your people – their behavior, engagement and focus on delivering against your strategic objectives – are the lynchpin to this success. How are you encouraging them, supporting them and motivating them during this time of fear?

Gallup recently offered these suggestions for executives to keep managers and workers focused and engaged:

Security: Leaders can't entirely quell those fears. They can't control the economy or predict the future, so they can't assure workers that everything is fine and always will be. But they can promote a feeling of stability from day to day, and that creates a sense of security and engagement.

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Imagine you are in charge of an international aid organisation whose focus is helping to rescue children from danger.

You have just learned that two dozen vulnerable children are trapped inside a war zone in a third world country. You now receive a phone call from an arms manufacturer who is supplying weapons to both sides in the war. He says he has his own fully equipped task force on the ground and would be willing to send in his team to bring the children to safety, but not the adults.

If you want him to execute the rescue you would have to agree to publically acknowledge the arm’s dealer’s action as part of their PR campaign to improve their public image.

• YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO DECIDE YOUR RESPONSE. WHAT WOULD IT BE?
• YOU MUST CHOOSE TO SAY OR NO TO THE PHONE CALL!
• MADE UP YOUR MIND?

TO FIND OUT WHAT THE REAL LIFE DIRECTOR DID
CLICK HERE

STOP! ONLY READ THE REST OF THE TEXT IF YOU HAVE FIRST READ THE ORIGINAL ETHICAL DILEMMA ARTICLE—TO READ IT CLICK HERE

The real life director of this international aid organisation who faced this ethical dilemma actually had only thirty second to make up his mind.

Faced with the difficult choice the director looked at the organisations core aims, mission and what was its purpose. He concluded the core purpose was to rescue children in danger and despite his severe reservation agreed to co-operate with the arms manufacturer.

However, he then wrote to all the stakeholders in the charity, including the staff, people who had made financial covenants to it and other supporters. He explained in a letter and e-mail the choice he had been faced with and why he had made the decision that he did. He said that he welcomed people’s comments and that if a substantial number of people disagreed with his actions he would resign.

Continuing on the change management theme of my last post how do you effect positive behaviour and culture change in your organisation?

Values-based employee recognition helps manage this change process by clearly showing employees how they demonstrate the company values in their daily efforts; how doing so benefits themselves, their teams, the company, and the customers; and how their efforts will be acknowledged and appreciated by both their peers and their managers.

This model for behaviour change through values-based recognition follows five steps.

1) Establish a clear ambition to unify efforts, then build your recognition programme around that ambition. We encourage Global Strategic Recognition, which rewards employees for reflecting the culture and desired behaviours that get needed results, and not just the result itself. More on this here.

Are you stuck in a measurement loop, measuring for measurement’s sake with no real action or benefit tied to what you learn?

A few weeks ago, I posted about the difference between awareness and enforcement and what this means to actually changing behaviour.

David Zinger, an authority on all things employee engagement, recently chaired the Second Annual Employee Engagement Conference in Barcelona. One of his eight lessons gleaned from the conference is on this concept of the value of measurement:

“Question questions. Do we believe the answer to employee engagement is asking another question or a better question or should we call surveys into question? Yes, I know the importance of data and research but I see far too many surveys that result in bell curves and depleted precious resources that could heighten rather than just measure engagement.”

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I’ve always been fascinated by the Warner Brothers Road Runner cartoons. The eternally hungry Wile E. Coyote pursues the roadrunner using a range of elaborate traps. Although getting painfully close every time, some element of his plan fails and he inevitably ends up at the bottom of the canyon. The Roadrunner disappears off into the distance with a jubilant “Meep Meep!” and the whole process begins again next time.

What interests me is why the coyote only tries each scheme once when the idea is often great!

So, I sometimes think about the old coyote when confronted by communicators who are scratching their heads trying to think about new ways of communicating. Trying something once or twice then abandoning it all too quickly, usually blaming the tactic not the content, and dismissing it as old news: “We did our induction training and on-boarding, we sent the introductory leaflets but they didn’t work., so we won’t use them again.”

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Mergers and acquisitions (M&A ) “will be grabbing media headlines over the coming months” according to an experienced asset manager quoted in a detailed new report on the future of asset management. This manager who was involved in 3 of the 10 biggest mergers of the last 15 years admits that “two failed to achieve the stated goals and one succeeded. The quality of integration was the key factor. The ones that failed were no more than an elaborate game of musical chairs which added nothing to the business other than an extra layer of complexity”

If madness is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome then the history of M&A suggests there are some pretty mad managers out there who have yet to learn that it is people not “assets” that make the difference in running a successful enterprise.