Organisations today have to ‘do more with less’ which brings with it the increasing pressure to track the effectiveness of talent initiatives and demonstrate real business value.

Dr Maria Yapp from Xancam, a Cirrus group company, and Liliya Apostolova from Lumesse will look at how organisations can embrace the increasing levels of complexity and change, and ensure a return on investment in talent in a variety of ways.

Join this live webinar to:

• Gain insight into the experiences of leading companies with comparisons of talent management trends and best practice

• Learn how to measure and achieve stronger ROI from your talent management initiatives

• Discover how technology can simplify, improve and drive more returns from talent management programmes

Please click here to register for this free webinar.

The post Join our webinar to explore the ROI in talent appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

Developers Anthony Brushwood, Andy Holland and Tim Daniel all join Cirrus from former online marketing agency, Custard Media. Damon Evans joins as a senior developer from TBWA.

The majority of Cirrus brand communications campaigns and leadership and brand engagement programmes now involve a digital element, whether that’s a website, an online portal, or a mobile phone app. Demand for digital services amongst our clients has increased significantly over the last 12 months.

Simon Fuller, digital services director at Cirrus, said: “At the start of 2013 I was tasked with fast-tracking the expansion of the digital offering here at Cirrus. Bringing these guys into the team is a great first step and our clients are already feeling the benefits.”

As well as creating effective external communications for clients such as Bupa, Breville, Brother and Redrow, Cirrus also works with major organisations including Marks & Spencer, EE and Shop Direct Group to develop leaders and engage employees with brand values.

Carol Smith, managing director of brand communications at Cirrus, said: “These appointments mean we are in an even stronger position to deliver the same high levels of quality, creativity and efficiency whatever the channel.

“Whether developing leaders, engaging with employees or delivering brand communications, ambitious clients increasingly want digital services to accelerate the process of change. Our strengthened team now ensures we can deliver all that and more.”

Read about our digital team expansion on the Prolific North and Huddled websites.

The post Cirrus goes deeper into digital appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

There is a big appointment in the world of football coming up, and the person filling it has never spent time in the dugout at the side of a pitch. Anthony Fry, due to take over as chairman of the Premier League in July, is a transfer from very different industry.

Fry is a corporate financier who has held numerous chairmanships and board positions across a range of businesses and not-for-profit organisations, including Chairman of Cirrus client Dairy Crest and a position on the BBC Trust. He has had no previous roles in football. However, the FA firmly believes he has “the correct blend of experience, skills, attitude and demeanour.”

Perhaps Fry will challenge some ingrained systems and beliefs. Often this is easier for a leader to do when they join an organisation from somewhere completely different. Bringing in a new leader from the outside can accelerate much-needed change.  New leaders often find it easier to challenge the status quo and make difficult decisions.  The most effective also take time to celebrate existing successes and capabilities rather than dismiss them.

Allan Leighton has built a hugely successful career from bringing his considerable expertise to businesses operating in some very different markets. An admired chief exec at Asda, he went on to take his career ‘plural’ with roles at a diverse range of businesses including Royal Mail, lastminute.com, BSkyB, Dyson and Selfridges. He has said, rather self-deprecatingly, that he has never had a good idea of his own – but keeps his eyes open wherever he goes.

So, is it always better to appoint a leader from the outside? Not necessarily. Look at Sir Terry Leahy, one of the UK’s most admired leaders, who led Tesco to market dominance. He joined as a marketing executive in 1979 and had completely transformed Tesco by the time he resigned his CEO post in 2011.

Leahy, a renowned innovator, also kept his eyes open everywhere he went. He looked beyond the boundaries of his own business to bring in fresh thinking from the outside. By doing this, home-grown leaders can still shake things up a bit. Many forward-thinking organisations have effective succession planning systems in place. The best develop highly-skilled leaders who are steeped in the company culture, while also embracing the new.

There’s another high-profile appointment in the world of football coming up too. The Football Association will also have a new chairman when Greg Dyke takes over in July. The former BBC director general has been a director of Manchester United and is currently chairman of Brentford Football Club. It is hoped that Dyke’s insider experience will help him to build trusted relationships with key stakeholders. Perhaps he represents an ideal blend of experience gained inside and outside the world of football. Come the summer, plenty of pundits will be ready to tell us just how well he’s doing.

Click here to read Nicky’s article on the Management Today website.

The post Nicky Little from Cirrus writes for Management Today appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

Do your unread emails run into the hundreds? Fear not, in the first of a series of posts on leadership skills, Nicky Little explains how to be more productive at work.

It is often said women in business don’t so much ‘have it all’ as ‘do it all’. Women are also said to be better multitaskers than men. You may feel both these observations are clichéd gender stereotypes, but look around the average workplace and it tends to be the female leaders who are juggling work with home commitments more than their male colleagues – and really feeling the pressure.

A lot of women deal with the challenges of modern working life by working longer hours. This is bad for you, bad for your home life, and ultimately bad for your employer, as overworked staff eventually become disengaged and less productive.

One of the most effective things you can do is to stop managing your time and start managing your energy. Time is a finite resource. Energy, however, is not. You cannot add more hours to the day, but you can boost your energy levels, getting more done in less time.

For many women, getting through the day is like running a marathon – it’s one long, hard, exhausting slog. Breaking your day up into series of short runs instead, with recovery periods in between, can make you feel more energised.

Think hard about your working day and break your workload into a series of achievable objectives. If you have a really important task to accomplish, start it first thing in the morning. Don’t put challenging tasks off – you may end up dreading them and rushing at the last minute. If you usually spend the first hour of your day dealing with email, try focusing exclusively on that big task instead. By 10am you’ll probably feel like you’ve already had a productive day.

Book in time for breaks – even when you think you really can’t spare the time. Taking just a little exercise boosts your energy levels. Studies show that making time for a 20-minute walk every day can help increase energy enough to improve your productivity. Try it and note how you feel afterwards. Make sure you get a good night’s sleep and eat well too. Inadequate sleep, nutrition and exercise diminish not only your energy levels, but also your ability to focus.

Something else you can do is to take control of your emotions. Think about how you react to events during a normal working day. Does bouncing ideas around with colleagues make you feel energised? If so, try and increase this kind of activity. Negative emotions can be real energy-sappers so tell yourself not to dwell on critical feedback or disagreements with colleagues. If you become aware of what triggers negative emotions, you realise you can start to control them by choosing how to react to things.

Often the things you do best are the things you love most. Can you delegate part of your job you don’t like? If not, streamline it and minimise the tasks that drain your energy. Think about your job as a whole and how it fits with your personal values as well as your personal goals. If there’s a conflict, your job probably doesn’t energise you. If this is a big issue, maybe you should look for another job that does.

Celebrating success is a hugely important way to boost energy so take time to celebrate small achievements as well as big wins. Gather your team regularly to share good news as this can motivate and energise everyone in the workplace. As a leader, you are a role model for others. If you are energised and in control of your working life and work/life balance, the people around you are more likely to be too.

Click here to read Nicky’s article on The Guardian website

The post The leadership toolkit: get more done and leave on time appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

We are thrilled that our work with Welcome to Yorkshire has been shortlisted for a prestigious Northern Marketing Award. The awards recognise marketing excellence and creativity.

The Cirrus brand communications team worked with Welcome to Yorkshire to create the ‘Have a Brilliant Yorkshire’ campaign, which has helped to position Yorkshire as a vibrant and contemporary place to visit. Welcome to Yorkshire is the official destination management organisation for Yorkshire, working with its members to grow the county’s visitor economy. It has created a fresh, dynamic view of the UK’s largest county and engaged new and existing visitors from across the globe. There are now an incredible 216 million visits to Yorkshire each year and tourism is worth £7 billion annually.

The ‘Have a Brilliant Yorkshire’ campaign has already been recognised by The World Travel Awards, where it won ‘World’s Leading Marketing Campaign’ in 2012. A great example of Welcome to Yorkshire’s increasing presence on the world stage was the recent announcement that Yorkshire will host Le Grand Départ of next year’s Tour de France.

“Cirrus has given us a campaign and property in ‘Have a Brilliant Yorkshire’,” saysVikki Harris, Head of Marketing at Welcome to Yorkshire. “This not only reflects the purpose and ambitions of our organisation, but is also in the very DNA of all our members and stakeholders in Yorkshire.”

We are proud to have helped Welcome to Yorkshire engage visitors in new ways with a bold and exciting proposition. Everyone should have a Brilliant Yorkshire.

The post Cirrus and Welcome to Yorkshire up for another award appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

Many brands are becoming more adept at engaging customers through social media. The latest Social Brands 100 list highlights the organisations who best use social media – in particular, Twitter and Facebook – to communicate with customers in new ways that lead to impressive results.

Many brands who already deliver great customer service via social media are now increasingly exploring opportunities for deeper brand engagement online. So as well as providing immediate responses which customers appreciate, great social media engagement can really boost customer loyalty and brand advocacy.

New levels of sophistication have emerged over the last 12 months. For example, many brands have developed a distinctive tone of voice online. Our client EE is a great example of this. Social media was an integral part of EE’s successful launch.  EE brand director Spencer McHugh told Marketing Week that “We thought about tone of voice a lot, alongside overall brand positioning in the market – opting for a combination of playful and purposeful.”

Like EE, more and more organisations are evolving brand engagement online by embedding their core purpose and values in their social media strategy. Combined with responsive service, this meets the immediate needs of customers while also building long-term relationships of trust.

Our clients at Shop Direct Group also made the list with their very.co.uk brand. We’ve been working closely with Shop Direct as they transform into a successful digital business by helping to create a more agile, digital mindset and to develop the behaviours that support this.

Another Cirrus client, Marks & Spencer, also appears. The distinctive M&S values, which include service, quality, trust, innovation and value, are brought to life as effectively online as they are in M&S stores.

Our friends at Dr Martens are also adept at engaging people via social media, successfully communicating their rich heritage with a modern twist.

The best brands know that social media is about building relationships, which means listening as well as simply broadcasting information. They are willing to embrace conversation, and unafraid of dealing with challenging feedback. After all, dealing well with a difficult situation can really build loyalty. Collaboration is key.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Social Brands list looks like in another 12 months, as more brands become adept at creating a social media presence that really engages people with their purpose and values.

The post Brand engagement through social media appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

Cirrus is researching the ROI in talent, and we would appreciate your help. We’d like to discover more about how important the ROI in talent is to organisations today, and how they measure it. Please click here to complete our short questionnaire which should take around five minutes. The survey will remain open until Thursday 23 May.

This research will form the basis of a white paper which Cirrus is putting together with Lumesse, the global specialist in talent software solutions. If you’d like a copy, please let us know or add your email address to the end of the survey. This will not be linked to your responses, which are completely confidential.

If you’d like to discuss the research in more detail, or to learn more about our talent services, please contact us.

Thank you very much!

The post Measuring the ROI in assessing and developing talent appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

How can organisations move from employee engagement towards real, transformational engagement? That’s the question we explored with guests from the BBC, BooHoo, Bruntwood, The Co-operative Pharmacy, HSS Hire and Warburtons over breakfast this week.

The conversation around the table was opened up by Louise Beardmore, head of organisational development and change at United Utilities.  Louise has been instrumental in helping United Utilities to become a more engaged organisation, where employees are increasingly aligned to a clear brand promise and customer satisfaction is increasing. As a key member of the Engage for Success employee engagement task force, she has helped raise awareness across the UK about the benefits of employee engagement.  Engage for Success is committed to the idea that there is a better way to work, a better way to enable personal growth, organisational growth, and ultimately growth for Britain by releasing more of the capability and potential of people at work.

Louise was particularly keen to discuss how organisations can move beyond engagement towards the kind of transformational engagement that drives real change. So, how can organisations achieve that? Well, there were a few big ideas around the table. Click here to discover more…

The post Transformational engagement: the big ideas appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

Nicky Little from Cirrus writes for Human Resources

The reputations of some organisations are inextricably linked with the attributes of their leaders. There is no doubt that Sir Alex Ferguson’s leadership style drove huge success at Manchester United, just as Steve Jobs drove huge success at Apple.

Both men were charismatic ‘hero’ leaders. This style of leadership can bring great results. It can also create a huge challenge for their successors.

Research demonstrates that while charismatic, transformational leaders like Sir Alex and Steve Jobs can inspire others and boost creativity, their tendency towards the authoritarian can create a dependency among followers. This can result in a gap when that leader is no longer around.

The transition at Apple from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook demonstrated a real shift from the heroic to post-heroic leadership. When Cook took over as Apple CEO, many questioned his ability as a leader. However, he appears to have successfully introduced a shared leadership model, with an effective balance between central and distributed leadership. Crucially, he has also sustained Apple’s success. Under his tenure, Apple shares rose to an all-time peak last September and although there are concerns over Apple’s current and future performance, it’s still one of the world’s highest-valued companies.

Sharing leadership responsibility and introducing a sense of balance may not be the most attractive proposition for leaders striving to achieve great results in a difficult economy – or for a football manager operating in a world where others are quick to judge you by the results of one match. For some it may suggest weakness and compromise. And yet research shows that shared leadership leads to increased performance and more sustainable success.

So what might David Moyes do when he takes over at Manchester United? Like Apple, Manchester United is a great brand with an enviable reputation. The challenge for Moyes is to respect the legacy he inherits while also thinking about how he can create future success. Although he shares many of Sir Alex’s attributes, such as focus and discipline, it is likely that he will also involve colleagues more in leadership decision-making. We may come to associate the values of the club more with its overall leadership rather than one charismatic leader.

Of course Manchester United, like Apple, is a global business and a global brand. Many analysts are watching the share price closely. The announcement of Sir Alex’s resignation wiped $50 million off the club’s value, just as Apple shares plummeted 5% after Steve Jobs died. Tim Cook managed to repair that damage, although there have been some ups and downs since. David Moyes will also be judged by Manchester United’s financial performance as well as by trophies.

Sir Alex, like Steve Jobs, took over a languishing organisation, and turned it around. Both leaders had the luxury of time on their sides. Moyes will enjoy no such luxury. He will be scrutinised and expected to deliver from the moment he takes over.

Like Cook, Moyes does not have to lead alone. He has a real opportunity to forge strong links with the talented colleagues around him, to combine the extensive skills and expertise inside Manchester United with some key new appointments from outside – both players and leadership colleagues.

Moyes, like Cook, will probably experience varying fortunes on his leadership journey. However, moving towards a more inclusive, shared leadership model can encourage interdependence and mutual trust. It could be good news for sustainability and long-term success – which should please analysts, fans and football pundits.

Click here to read Nicky’s article on the Human Resources website.

The post Manchester Utd and Apple: The challenges of succeeding a hero leader appeared first on Cirrus Connect.

Our next Cirrus Connections breakfast is an exclusive event for senior HR and talent leaders and will focus on the theme of ‘Future Talent’. We’ll be joined by two fascinating guest speakers from M&S and PayPal to enjoy learning and networking over breakfast at the top of The Gherkin in London.

Attracting, developing and retaining talent is a multifaceted process. In a fast-changing world, how can talent management help us transform organisations – and how can you ensure your talent initiatives lead to great results?

Together we will explore:

• Attracting and retaining talent in line with your strategic goals
• Talent development to drive growth in challenging times
• Ensuring return on your investment in talent

About our speakers

Nigel Jeremy, Head of Learning, Recruitment and Organisation Development, Marks & Spencer

Nigel is responsible for developing leadership, future talent and succession planning for Marks & Spencer in line with the company’s much-admired brand values and overall strategic goals. He has extensive experience of leading learning and development in a wide range of market-leading organisations, including easyJet, Vodafone and HBOS.

Stanley Wachs, General Manager, Greater Europe, PayPal

Stanley is an experienced global leader with responsibility for developing PayPal business and building strategic relationships across Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey. He is passionate about developing talent to drive future growth in an organisation renowned for innovation. Prior to joining PayPal, he held international leadership roles at Western Union.

Dr Maria Yapp, Head of Xancam, a Cirrus Group company

Maria is an expert in talent strategy, assessment and development, working in partnership with leading organisations including Allianz, Coca-Cola, eBay and Royal Mail.  She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist  with an MBA and a DPhil in Psychology from Oxford University, an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, founder member of the Association of Business Psychologists, and has been a regular on HR’S Most Influential list.

This is an exclusive event for senior HR and talent leaders, and space is limited. The majority of places are reserved for our clients. However, if you are interested in coming along, please contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

The post Future Talent: M&S and PayPal join Cirrus for breakfast appeared first on Cirrus Connect.