The Culture Builders

The Culture Builders Deep Dive - From Fruit Flies to Frozen Planet - a Cultural Journey

From an audience of fruit flies, to a global one numbering in the billions, Nicki Sheard, President, Brands & Licensing for BBC Studios, has had a highly varied career that's led to her current role. She's worked in FMCG, Fashion and Gaming sectors, and has held a number of roles across the BBC group.
Jane got the chance to talk to Nicki about her experiences across this diverse portfolio and share them on our latest podcast. The singles biggest differentiator in each role has, for Nicki, been the culture. She has drawn learnings from every experience, good and bad - helping her to understand the key levers to focus on and how to create a positive, effective team that enables people to challenge, learn and grow.
 
For Nicki, the podcast was a great exercise around reflection - helping her to work through the experiences she's had, and how it has shaped her approach to building a strong culture within her BBC team.
 

The Culture Builders Deep Dive – Word of the Year

It’s mere days before we hear the strains of Auld Lang Syne played across the globe, as we say goodbye to a challenging 2022, and step into an uncertain 2023. Jane and Chris’s advice is simple – have a word ready to set the tone.
Over the last few years The Culture Builders’ team has made it a habit to choose a personal word each year that helps them find new and more productive ways of working and thriving. Jane and Chris share their previous words and, as an exclusive sneak-peek, share their next year’s ones now. The question is… What’s yours going to be?

The Culture Builders Deep Dive – Meet the Bank of Me

Over the last two years the pressure of work has simply grown and grown – phrases such as ‘The Great Resignation,’ ‘Quiet Quitting,’ and ‘Husk Workers’ have all sprung up as we all find the professional life more challenging than ever, and leaving us to ask the tough question of ‘why’.
On this podcast, Chris and Jane talk through the key factors that led them to creating the Bank of Me app – a tool aimed at helping busy professionals to stay well, focused and productive in a very tough environment. Burn-out is the word of the moment, and the impact for organisations is huge. More than ever there’s a need to provide support and advice to those struggling with the daily grind.
Four years ago we launched the book on this podcast, and now it's the turn of our app!

The Culture Builders Deep Dive - impact of isolation

 Jane Sparrow, speaks with designer and maker Stephen Bailey - who shares his story behind being self-employed and working alone, as well as the experience of taking part in an 'impact of work' study and how it made himself more aware of his mental wellbeing, particularly during the pandemic.
Lots of ideas, tips and inspiration to help us all move forwards with our health.

The Culture Builders Deep Dive - Beating The Monday Blues

Jane Sparrow speaks with Kirstin Furber, People Director at Channel 4 - who shares her advice on how to tackle Sunday night blues, as well as tips on workplace wellbeing. Her organisation has recently placed a great emphasis on making Monday the highlight of the week, rather than the lowlight.
Lots of ideas, tips and inspiration to help us all move forwards with our health.

The Culture Builders Deep Dive – Creating a Culture of Financial Wellbeing

Organisations, quite rightly, are very proactive in providing mental wellbeing support to their employees. Perhaps less so with physical wellbeing… but even worse when it comes to financial wellbeing. On this note, as we enter the ‘Talk Money’ week and there’s a raised focus on this area, Jane caught up with one of the UK’s leading financial wellbeing consultants – Emma Waller – to look at how organisations can make money-sense a cultural differentiator.
Emma is a Financial Wellbeing Consultant with extensive experience in developing financial content across private, public and voluntary sectors, designing and delivering financial wellbeing programmes for commercial clients and charities. Her steer for how organisations can support their people when it comes to money matters hits the perfect note – balancing the need for frugality and sensible planning, with the importance of reward and ‘spending to save’.
Her view is that this needs to be an area that more organisations take an active approach to – talking to their teams about money, giving advice and making it a shared activity – something Emma makes good use of when she contributes to Tuddl.

The Culture Builders Burst - Flex Working Take-aways

Jane caught up with our Head of Programmes, Owen Cook, who recently delivered a taster webinar to share our latest thinking around the hugely topic of flex working. On this podcast he shares an overall structure for developing a consistent, sustainable road-map for an organisation's way forward.
Plenty of practical ideas to get you thinking and open up wider conversations within your organisation to progress your own future of work planning.

The Culture Builders Deep Dive – Making the Four Day Week Work

“Four day working week ahead” shout all the headlines at the moment. But, as many are finding out, the reality of a truncated working pattern is far from easy. Jane got a chance to talk to David Taylor, the Group Commercial Director for Costain, who shared with her his experience of changing from a five to a four day week.
The move was part of his search for a ‘quality of life upgrade’ but, when he trialled it, David found it was anything but – working a four day week just shifted the work into the weekend and pressurised the rest of the working week. It took a more fundamental change from David to get on track – using the muscle of Trust, and the skill of effective delegation to make appropriate space.
On the podcast, he talks about the need to correctly message people about the intent, to manage expectations, and for the individual to deliver the proof that it can work. It’s a privilege, not a right, for David. He also shares the side benefit for others - how stepping back actually gives others a chance to step in and take more responsibility and grab learning opportunities. A great listen for anyone thinking of moving to a shorter working week.

The Culture Builders Deep Dive – Flex in the new world of work

There is, without a doubt, a huge, global desire to remove the nine to five working patterns. But, to be balanced, it’s been on the way out for a number of years… but slowly and with great effort by a few determined people.
In that vein, meet Emma Cleary – Founder of Flexibility Matters, an organisation that’s been specialising in placing candidates that are looking for flexible working patterns. In Emma’s own words, it’s been a tough sell for many years. But, for her, the rollercoaster cart has reached the top of the climb, and now is hurtling along the tracks.
Why? Because we’ve all proved, conclusively, that flex working… works. We got some time with Emma recently to talk more about this, and get her views on the benefits (which have always been evident to some) of employing people that don’t adhere to the traditional patterns. Also, linked to this, is the trawl for talent and the attraction factors that an organisation needs to demonstrate.
In short, it’s a rich conversation between her and Chris!

The Culture Builders Burst – putting numbers to the impact of the pandemic

During the early autumn of 2021, The Culture Builders commissioned an independent research project to look at the impact of the pandemic on organisations across the UK, and beyond. The aim was to identify the key factors that have been impacted (positively and negatively by the Lockdown and restrictions, and to chart out how this impact differs across organisations.
The inevitable results demonstrated that areas such as engagement, talent development and culture have all been impacted (but more deeply than first thought). But the research told a story of two situations – smaller companies have been harder hit, but are more ready for the next phase, whereas larger organisations feel less impacted, but are still very much in the planning and exploration stage of their response.
In this Burst episode, Chris Preston shares the top line summary, and his take on the findings – plus he shares the key factors that HR professionals believe will be the must-have traits for leaders taking people forward in this new post-pandemic poly-working world.
You can get a copy of the White Paper here.