Social Leader Series - Wendy Bartlett - Bartlett Mitchell

Following on from the 'Yapster introduction to Social Leadership' Webinar, a series of live presentations from real leaders sharing their own approaches to influencing colleagues at digital scale.

Webinar transcript

Thu, 5/7 6:08PM • 50:36 

SPEAKERS Rob Liddiard, Wendy Bartlett 

[Note: this transcript was created automatically, using a digital transcription tool. It has been lightly edited for clarity, but may contain minor typos or inaccuracies

Rob Liddiard 00:13

Hi everybody, so we're just waiting for everybody to join the webinar and we'll start in a minute or so. All right, Wendy, I think we've got a decent group of participants. I'm sure more will join as we go on. So should we should we begin?

Wendy Bartlett 01:07

Yeah, that's absolutely fine.

Rob Liddiard 01:09

Fantastic. Okay, hello, everybody. So... ...a brief agenda: I'll do no more than a couple of minutes on what social leadership is from a Yapster perspective and why we're so excited that Wendy from Bartlett Mitchell has chosen to talk about her view on social leadership. Wendy is then going to take us through a bit of a history of Bartlett Mitchell, how they're configured, what their values are, and how that translates to the Bartlett Mitchell service.

Then we'll move on and the lion's share of the session will just be diving into Wendy's techniques as a social leader and also her colleagues. The cool thing about about Bartlett Mitchell is there are leaders all across that organization, socially. Wendy's also been very generous and has allowed us to share some of her own Leader metrics as they appear in Yapster, which really means different types of activity.

We'll try to be finished with the structured part of the session no later than half past two, maybe earlier if we can, so that those of you do have observations or questions can raise them.

So, two minutes on me, what is a Social Leader? Social leadership is effectively just influencing people at work using digital tools.

Those of you that saw our introduction to social leadership webinar will know that the reason that we need to influence people at work is, if we want to make a big impact on the world, or on our customer community, it's very, very difficult to do that on your own.

Even if you're in a software business where the technology in theory can travel to any geography in the world and to any number of users, actually there's only so much that you can build on your own. So if you want to achieve anything at scale or significant in volume terms you need to bring people with you.

Social leadership is all about influencing people so that you can bring them with you on your mission.

These are the tools that are available to the social leader, as we understand it: broadcasting, reacting and engaging in direct communication. I'm not going to dwell on the slide here because we'll come back to this later, specifically in the context of how Wendy thinks about reaching her audience through those different mediums.

So - we're at four minutes past two - for once in my life I kept to time. So with that, I'm excited to introduce Wendy who can tell her story much better than I ever could.

Wendy Bartlett 04:33Hi, everybody. So just a very quick ‘who and why?’. Bartlett Mitchell are contract caterers. Ian who you see there, in his normal stance with a glass of wine in his hand, and I joined together 20 years ago. We both put £20k into the business started in our bedroom, and we were very clear about the ‘why’ we would run the company, and that was basically because we both love food and we love having fun.

So we decided that we wanted to have a company that had those values rather than the ones that we worked for, which was predominantly about making money.

Here’s a little further information about our company. We're about to hit - well we were! - £55million turnover. God knows what we'll be at the end of this year. We do contract catering for companies like the FCA, Microsoft, Sony discovery.

The thing about that is our team are based in other people's businesses. So if they work at Disney, for example, then they're very much part of Disney's culture. And that's where they are daily. So I have to work really, really hard to get our team engaged with us and as you can see on glass door, we've got 4.2 which is pretty okay for a company that is so separated as a business.

So, when we did our values about 10 years ago, we changed them and distilled them into these ‘foodies’ values. And this is the bedrock of everything that we do.

So it's about ‘fundamentally food’, which was our tagline to start with. And about our people, our teams, and we use these in everything that we do.

So if someone's doing something, they say, ‘Oh, thank you your support I can trust’. So it's very much something that all the team use, rather than just being something on the wall.

When I sent this slide to Rob, I wasn't quite sure whether he wanted to use it because it's quite complicated. But one of the key things for us was about our ‘why’ and that was we want to make a positive difference to everybody's day.

We use our foodies values and we use all of this to interact and know what the rules are for interaction both with our clients, our customers, and more importantly to our team.

They need to know how they should behave and what it should make them feel like.

Rob Liddiard 07:22

Wendy, the reason I thought it worthwhile putting this up on the screen for this group is we're going to get on to social leadership and how you engage with your team shortly. But everybody has values, right? And everybody talks about aspiration in what they want their business to be. What people rarely talk about is what would be the alternative future for Bartlett Mitchell, if you didn't have these values at founding?

Wendy Bartlett 07:53

I think your team get a bit lost. Everyone wants a sense of belonging and they want to know where they're going and why they're there. And what behavior should be like.

Everyone likes guidance. Not that we're all sheep - it’s just that everyone likes that steadiness, they like a steady ship and need to know who the captain is.

If you don't have clarity, and something that is the glue that holds you together, then I think it makes the job much harder. It’s harder for everyone to have that consistent message down the line.

And culture, for me - which I think I'm in charge of within our company, that's my job - is clear. There's no good the bosses knowing what the culture is, and then no one else really understanding or living it. It's more important to live it and anything else.

Rob Liddiard 08:49

I wouldn't ask you to trash your competitors. Of course, I know you've got way too much class to do that. But is it right for me to infer that this is what makes you somewhat special in your category - because this is quite hard to maintain, isn't it?

Everything we're reading on this screen here sort of feels like common sense, but I'm assuming there are an awful lot of businesses that don't manage to deliver these things.

Wendy Bartlett 09:14

Well, you know, everyone's different. Everyone's got their unique place in the market. About 10 years ago, our marketing director Lynn took what we were doing in terms of selling, what our team said and what our clients said. And then we came up with ‘BM family’ and about love and our values.

That's when we decided we had to distill more clearly what we were about. If you're a massive corporate, it's very hard to do. It is very hard to stand out in a different way. But everyone's got their branding, and this just happens to be ours. Our values are about that BM family and that's what makes us different.

Rob Liddiard 10:02

Fortunately because you're so open with us and you do share with us, we get to see those values being lived. So, we’re about to move into talking about specifically the way you use our tool, but it would be good to discuss how you practice social leadership generally. Clearly, we're just one part of your communication landscape.

I think it would be great for the group if you were willing to talk through your mix of structured and unstructured communication, digital and face to face communication from here.

Wendy Bartlett 10:40

Because we're so separate, and probably 70% of our team don't have access to PCs, it's very difficult for us to communicate. Noticeboards - everyone gets bored with them and stops looking at them.

So... if you look at our team [on this chart], the blue represents the structure within our company from board to general team members, and then there's the tools and the things that we do to communicate with them.

As a group, we use Yammer [part of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite] quite a lot as a replacement for emails. Each site has its own Yammer page. So if something happens, we know what is happening on that site - you have to remember I've got about 100 contracts and something will be different in every single one. It's like running 100 businesses because every one is unique to that client.

We noticed that we were doing lots of celebrating sharing things on Yammer and the rest of the team were getting very “Oh, what, wait.. why can't we see?” So they were feeling very left out.

So that was when Yapster came on board. Our strategy is saying: “how do we touch and make sure that communication flow is good for everybody?”.

Rob Liddiard 12:02

One of the things I’ve found most interesting since we met and started working together is how clear you are about the fact that you had this need to communicate with frontline people that were outside your prior communications architecture. You weren't at all awkward about having a mix of systems, face to face and digital enablement, as long as overall they serve the Bartlett Mitchell values.

Wendy Bartlett 12:31

For Yeah, you've got to you've got to be clear what that tool is for. Say Yammer - I always say to people, ‘Yammer is about replacement of email’. If you are going to have a conversation with somebody in a room, it is that Yammer group that you use now that's because we very rarely all get together as a team.

As you can see [from the chart], we do strategy days and an AGM, but that's pretty much the only time that we all come together as a whole as a leadership team. Most of our stuff is done by Yammer, as a replacement for email.

Yapster, for me, is about communicating directly with the team. From Yammer, I saw that they loved celebrating success. They love the recognition of the values - we do a lot with sending cards out saying thank you, you've lived that value or, you know, this is a value that we're demonstrating here.

And the majority of our team were missing out that - so Yapster for me is a replacement for WhatsApp and Instagram.

Instagram is very big with chefs who love showing off their food. So with Yapster I combined both of those, plus being GDPR compliant (because WhatsApp obviously isn't) and it gave me more control.

But it's very much their tool, not mine. And I always say that too. It's for them to use and we just fill in the incomplete information. In fact, I think Murray [Soper - Bartlett Mitchell’s Talent & Team Manager] is on the call, who looks after Yapster for me. Murray is the person that looks after Yapster and makes sure that the company information we need is in. It’s fairly minimal, but important. And then I write to everyone about once a month just to say, ‘this is what's going on in the company’.

Rob Liddiard 14:17

So many people get caught up in what the technologies are and the competition between technologies, they sort of forget what their purpose is - from a values perspective. They start to think it's all about the tool, rather than about the values and the mission.

Wendy Bartlett 14:39

We use a lot of apps. We use Harri, which is pre recruitment and we use [CPL for training, which is a] fantastic app - I'm loving it!

Lots of people I think get confused and say ‘I've got to build all this myself’ or they've all got to be interactive in one app. Well, why not let the people who do it best make happen for you? You know, we can get a new app in place within six weeks to two months. Whereas when you give it to an IT department to deal with, it just takes too long.

I'm not going to dwell on this slide here. But what you'll see here is across the different types of things that happen just in Yapster. Remember, this is just one corner of Wendy's communication estate. If you include all digital tools and all of the face to face things that they do, you can get some sort of feel for the consistency and the volume of content.

This data snapshot was done at the very beginning of May, which is why the numbers are obviously low for May, but this will give you a feel for the general health of Wendy's communication estate. Remember, there'll be lots and lots of things going on outside of this.

I'm just going to do just a couple of minutes on the components of social leadership.

So by way of reminder, these are the tools that we see as being available to the social leader - in our case on Yapster, but actually on any platform that you might use to engage and influence people at scale.

You should always demand at the very least, the ability to:

broadcast a message to everybody and in Yapster that's a newsfeed post... react and engage with [other people’s] content; and...
have direct communication.

Your role will determine your ideal mix as a social leader, whether you should be broadcasting more, reacting and engaging more or direct messaging more.

So, those are the three tools that are available to the social leader. Wendy has been a great sport and has allowed us to share some of her stats from a recent time series, and so you can see those highlighted here now.

Wendy, would you mind talking a bit about what your role is in the business and therefore the sorts of Communications (at least within Yapster) that you like to have with your team? Perhaps also give the group a feel for the sorts of conversations you expect other people that you work with in leadership positions to be having to also be their own type of social leader.

Wendy Bartlett 18:33With Yapster and Yammer, if you want to implement something, you've got to walk the talk and then it will take a life of its own.

So, for example, Yammer at the moment, with everything that's going on out in the world, I'm not the leader within Yammer groups. My team use it much more, but in the beginning of the business I used it much more. I think to get something over the line, that was my job. If you're going to commit to do something and you want it to work, then the leaders have to partake in it.

Quite often my colleagues and other companies similar to ours will say, ‘we can't get Yammer to work’. And I said, “but that's because if you don't get the bosses to use it and say, ‘No, this is how I'm going to communicate’, why would your team do it?”

With Yapster, I was very clear that it's not a business tool that is just gonna be full of company stuff, because people won't want to look at it. So it's got to be very much more fun.

When I post Yapster messages I quite often put a spelling mistake in there, which I'm quite good at anyway naturally! But I quite often do that.

Say I know someone's lost a member of their family, or I saw that they've got a particular job. Or I've seen a client and they've mentioned a particular person. I will send them a message via Yapster and say, ‘Well done, I just wanted to say thank you.’ I know they will take that and show probably someone in their house and say ‘this is my boss, the founder’, which will mean more because it's me.

It can become a bit onerous because if I don't comment on something, then my team will say ‘you didn't comment on what I was doing’. So that's how important it is.

And I think I've told you this story before, Rob, that years ago, when I was a very junior manager, we used to do the staff awards (and as you get a bit older, you sort of get a bit more cynical about them) but I remember [giving an award to] a general assistant and I went around her house later and there on the wall on her mantelpiece was the actual certificate for winning that team award.

Now, for us at a higher level getting recognition in other ways, we probably think ‘Oh, well, whatever, I'm not really interested in [certificates]’. But I always say to my team, it's really important that you recognise how [the frontline colleagues] feel. This isn't about how you feel. This is about how they feel.

A chef will have you post a picture of the lunch that you've just really enjoyed. They absolutely love it. How can I say to them, ‘you've got to enjoy your job, you've got to have fun with food’, if I'm not doing that?

It's like asking someone to smile when you're not smiling at them.

Rob Liddiard 21:39

Wendy, when you recruit your other leaders in the organisation, how do you screen to ensure that they're going to be able to basically keep up with this social leadership foundation of your business? Because that predates Yapster, as far as I can tell.

We've got quite a few people in this [webinar] that are on Yapster themselves. And my guess is they won't all have the same sort of [usage] numbers as they're seeing on the screen. Not just for you, senior executive level, but also the other colleague names that you can see below. Is that something that's happened organically? Did you recruit for it? Do you train for it? Do you just nag everyone? How does that work?

Wendy Bartlett 22:32

I'm quite good at nagging - that is one of my traits. But Murray [Talent & Team Manager] every week puts up what the engagement levels are per area person, as a team responsibility.

You can tell quite a lot from those that do not engage with their teams. They have a different feel to those that do engage with their teams.

Everyone won't be the same. Everyone won't be like me. My CEO and MD, for instance, don't engage as much as me. Neither of their names are on [this data chart], because I do that bit of a job for them - they're running the business, so it would confuse too much.

They do partake, but not to the extent that I do. But I'm in charge of culture. I'm in charge of making that Bartlett Mitchell family feel, because I suppose I'm the mother of that family.

If you look there [at the usage chart], Gareth, for example, and Tripti who are on that list. Tripti is a hospitality waitress, and Gareth is a chef manager in Manchester, but they're just naturally gregarious people.

What I have found is that some people don't use Yapster or post, but they do stalk it. Now, I'm okay with that, because I'm still influencing the way they feel about Bartlett Mitchell and they’re still getting the messages. It's like a drip feed through the business that you'll get. You will also get those that are not engaged and that's absolutely fine as well.

Rob Liddiard 23:59

Yeah. I think that's right. The power of the lurker is really interesting because I think so many people feel this need for ‘likes’. But your job isn't to be liked as a leader (as in digital likes). Your job is to influence people at work.

These are just some screen grabs that we grabbed literally in the last couple of days. Actually, if we mined your newsfeed, we could have found some unbelievable stuff.

Wendy Bartlett 24:37

[In the screenshot on the left, I had two people come] to stay with me for a week. And the other day in the garden, they started singing so it's a bit of fun. It's about being honest and natural. I don't make it very formal.

On the other side, [I’m posting that] I've done my training. So, you know, I probably don't need to do training courses. But every time I do one of the training courses, I post. [Then colleagues will think] ‘Wendy's doing that, so I can't really complain about doing my training’.

And the [screenshot] in the middle was we gave some money away to charity. And so I posted a letter there that because otherwise, I might get that letter and it's not about me, it's about the whole family. So this thank you note was for everyone and it recognized George who put them forward.

So it's very much about posting from the heart and being natural. Don't think about it too much. You know, it's a two second job. Don't make it a corporate speech. Make it fun.

Rob Liddiard

Do you think this is harder actually, for big company executives that perhaps didn't found their own company and therefore are used to calculating perhaps more of the things they do both downwards and upwards.

I mean, and then in a minute, we can talk about the way you react to engage. But I don't want to preempt the group in terms of questions. But I think that is a fascinating question whether a big company type person could be as authentic as you are, when they're not the founder. What's your view on that?

Wendy Bartlett 26:19

Richard Branson, does it at the end of the day but there's lots of people. It's about your personality and the culture of that company you're running. They may not be as frivolous as me, and down on the street - you know, everyone knows everything about me because I'm just that sort of person - but I think you could still do it in terms of recognition saying ‘thank you’. ‘This is the lunch I've had today’. ‘This is what I saw as a good bit of service’. ‘What a great job you've done on this track’.

So I think [Yapster is] a fantastic tool for recognising. Funnily enough, it's changed quite a lot during this COVID period. Before it was all about food in the restaurants, you know, thanking teams for doing great jobs, newsfeed about what was happening, and it’s sort of come into its own in a different way.

Now we're putting on funny jokey things, which we never really put on before. But you can see Murray on the next one has put something about sitting up correctly when you're working. So Murray probably feeds about one or two things a day into the feed about which is more business-like information.

Rob Liddiard 28:05

Murray would be great to have on because I think he is an excellent example of somebody that's a good practitioner of social leadership without necessarily founding the company.

Wendy Bartlett 28:36

So here, Shanka - who's actually not a chef, but he’s a Sri Lankan manager - has posted, which I thought looked lovely. He's very proud of being Sri Lankan and so I comment on it, because he's made the effort to post it.

The thing that's really important to remember about commenting is that it gives them some sort of recognition. And it enforces the fact that I think they're really ‘foodie’. And that's one of our values - interested in food.

So then it makes other people [Foodie], which has happened in Yapster in the last week. Everyone's got much more foodie, and we're quite foodie anyway, but they're sharing their personal foodie ness if you like.

It also helps me when I go into a site. What I do is I look quickly at names [in the Yapster Directory], and then I can tell the people I sort of recognise their names. That makes it a little bit easier for me to know about them personally and as people.

And the other point of that is they know each other much more. I've seen much more interaction now, [even though] they very rarely meet up. In fact, the managers only meet twice a year. Waitresses and chef's would never meet all together, except for if we have a party, but actually because of Yapster, they do know each other. And even though I know they physically never met some other people, they have formed sort of bantering, you know, friendships through it.

Rob Liddiard 30:16

And is there a business benefit to that Wendy, for people forming that internal celebrity and banter?

Wendy Bartlett 30:21

Well, I tell you what it does, it really helps me with best practice. So a good example would be if someone posted a tray of hospitality sandwiches for example, and they're posting up really lovely ones. If you then produced [the same] on that day, and you look at [yours], and you go, ‘Oh, my God, mine didn't look anything like that’. You would then think, ‘Oh, I better up my game’.

And so that helps us. It helps me see as well and the team see where that level of food is in their quality. So if they post up things that aren't particularly brilliant, we might then send the executive chef in to help them a little bit. We'd never say it was terrible.

I think we've only ever taken one single post down one. Because it is completely unmonitored, we let them post pretty much what they like. Someone objected to something to do nationalism. So if I do have a comment to make to someone about it, I write to them directly and I say ‘fantastic job - however, this is the purpose of Yapster so would you mind helping me build it that way and, you know, not post this stuff?’

Rob Liddiard 31:42

Let’s move on to direct communication. You've already mentioned the times when you think that's important, like if someone has a personal issue you want to acknowledge.

You are Exec Chairperson of a 1200 person company. Clearly it would be unsustainable and therefore probably demotivating, rather rather than motivating, if you tried to have direct communication with everyone, because you wouldn't be able to keep up. So you cherry pick the instances where you pop up on a direct messaging basis.

You've already covered the pastoral care side of things, so perhaps we don't need to go back into that. It’s interesting that you use it to give corrective interventions with people. Where do you think the line is between giving someone critical feedback?

Forget Yapster, but any digital platform versus in person - when if you don't give the feedback digitally, then you probably will never give it because you're not going to be there in person.

There's a big debate in the community as to whether digital tools should really only be used for positive influence. I'm open-minded about that at the moment and I'd be interested in your view as to when it's appropriate to give friendly, firm feedback.

Wendy Bartlett 33:04

Well, you would never criticize someone in public. So I think it's completely incorrect. And what I view is correct and right may not be what they view is correct and right.

So I think you've got to be really careful, you know, culturally, where your team's education levels come from.

But you know, I've never had a problem. The only time I ever write to them directly is because they're not allowed to mention their client names. And recently, someone started posting about Trump. And so I said, ‘you know, I may agree with what you're saying, but let's not get political’.

And yes, it's inappropriate because you don't know what other people's views are. So if I point that out, they're pretty good. And then that stops if no one else sort of picks it up because they think well, that's not really what this for. So it's created its own natural forum rules rather than my rules, I would say.

I think of direct messaging if it's someone's special birthday, or if they've done something particularly well. They love a direct message because that's literally like saying, ‘thank you’ personally and I wouldn't have their phone numbers to ring them.

Rob Liddiard 34:27

Yeah, that's brilliant. Thank you.

Wendy Bartlett 34:51

You must tell the story about your Bartlett Mitchell Yapster experience today!

Rob Liddiard 34:55

I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll put this question to you. And then while we're chatting about it, I'll put the live screen share of my phone up on the screen for the group as a reward to those that stuck with us for the structured comments.

So the first question that's come in is, could you tell us the time when you struggled to get buy in for team team members and how you approached it?

Wendy Bartlett 35:22

God, we struggled at the very beginning and struggled probably with more senior teams because they also do Yammer. So they got a bit confused by that. And so I think it took maybe three months of us getting started. I had to be really proactive - and we measure people's engagement per patch as well.

What I always say to the senior team is, ‘you may think it's not important and you may think it's frivolous, but it's not about you. It's about the frontline team. Your recognition of them will mean much more. You know, if you take two seconds to do that, then not recognizing them at all. So stop thinking about the senior team and what your needs are. This is about the wider Bartlett Mitchell family.’

So probably three months of hard nagging - every time I do that.

Rob Liddiard 36:25

Alice asks, ‘Hi, Wendy, thanks for your talk. super interesting insights. So I'm wondering about social leadership through crisis (i.e. now). Presumably many of your employees are furloughed at the moment. Why is a tool like Yapster - although because this isn't really supposed to be just about Yapster - so, why is social leadership and why is digital communication particularly useful during a time like this?

Wendy Bartlett 36:48

Well, this has been about Yapster, actually. I'm really grateful that we have got Yapster, because I don't know how other people are coping in my industry that don't have anything like it.

A lot of the team have told me they still feel connected to us. When you're furloughed and you're stuck at home, you don't know whether you're going to get a job or not. You don't know what's happening at work. So Yapster has allowed us - Ian, the CEO and I - to do a message each week. We do a video chat, we just say, ‘look, we're thinking of you. This is what we're doing’.

We've been able to give them amazing tools, how to help pay your rent, how to pay your electricity, gas utility bills, what you can do on that, we've sent them loads of mental health information. We've never had so many company messages go out to everybody.

You may not need to know mental health and you know, people to phone, but the fact that we've thought about it and sent it to every single person, everybody's really appreciated and I think what they've appreciated more than anything, is that if you're stuck in your home, on your own at home for those that are on their own, they absolutely feel connected to Bartlett Mitchell. They don't feel like they've been abandoned. They're very clear about what's going to happen. What's open to them.

So, for furloughed people, I think engagement has probably been much higher. Our engagement stats have gone much higher at this time than normal. Yapster has been an invaluable tool.

Rob Liddiard 38:22

Yeah, I had a look just before we came on, because I wondered if we'd be asked about your stats: you've got 88% onboarded, 73% active. What’s interesting is you've also got 33% Interactive, which means you're right, most people will be consuming content, and that's fine. But a whole third of people are actively participating in the family.

Wendy Bartlett 39:15

Murray just pasted in chat that our engagement went up 15% when this all happened, so that absolutely shows that's got nothing to do with me telling them to do that. [They yap] because they like it. And that's the way they feel connected. And it's the only way I communicate with them because all of them are at home and uncontactable.

Rob Liddiard 39:40

I've got a question that's come in by email for organizations that have just moved on to a social leadership platform or an all staff messaging tool like Yapster during furlough. Do you think you could have got the same uptake and engagement if you'd launched during a time of crisis? Or do you think you've got the benefit of having done it when the waters were less choppy?

Wendy Bartlett 40:27

I think doing it through this time would have been easier. I think the issue is getting it onto their phones, because we had to go and help quite a lot of people. You can't assume everyone's as clever. [Usage] rises, as you know, people use it a lot. But I think actually this moment in time has helped it immediately.

Rob Liddiard 40:57

So Wendy, hopefully you can now see my phone on the screen?

Wendy Bartlett 41:03

I can see your phone your lovely girlfriend

Rob Liddiard 41:07

Wife - now wife!

Wendy Bartlett 41:08

Ah wife, sorry - yes, you did get married!

Rob Liddiard 41:10

For those that I don't know personally, we use a bring your own device policy at Yapster because we think it's pretty important to, as best we can, not feel like head office people. We want to feel like floor teams and so not having a corporate device that you can put in your drawer at the weekend is quite important to that.

The downside of that is it means that I subject more people than I should, and my poor wife, to this mix of personal and work.

So I'm going to pull the app up in a second. But I think this actually goes quite nicely to the question that Cristiano has just asked: any tips on getting Cristiano’s team to embrace Yapster and engage more in sharing and discussing particular topics? What would your recommendation be to Cristiano?

Wendy Bartlett 42:06

And we could ask Murray as well, because he does that. But I think you probably have to have an ambassador for it. You know, you got to have people doing it, who take it on as that project. That's what we do. It has to be something that they're interested in.

Rob Liddiard 42:43

Christiano, what I would add is what we've learned through data analytics and the reason we wanted you to meet and listen to Wendy and the reason that - with her permission - we showed her personal social leadership stats is there are two sides of this equation for being successful.

We as technologists need to make the product faster and easy to use. And we're always on that. And Wendy is the first to tell me when we need to be better, right, that is a big part of it.

But the other part of it that has nothing to do with the technology - is to do with the content and the authenticity of the brand and the values and the culture.

So if when you look at your usage, statistics and the table (the social leaders influencers table that I just showed you from Wendy's organisation) and your most influential people are not president, then it's very, very difficult to ask your frontline colleagues to put their head above the parapet and get the party started for you.

What I would say is that the easiest way you can get others to celebrate your personal business culture and participate is for you to in fact, as Wendy said about 15 minutes ago, walk the talk.

What you'll find is that if you put yourself out there first and you're consistent, and you're authentic, actually other people will begin to follow you.

What I'm showing now is Wendy's live news feed.

I've gone back a few days, just so you can see the interaction with the post, because when I get back to the posts that have been made in the last two hours, they've obviously so fresh that it will take some time for people to engage with them. So the fruits that you're seeing here are all because of the seeds that people like Wendy and Murray and various senior colleagues planted over the preceding period.

So Wendy, I'm just gonna scroll and I’ll finish when we land on the post [you asked me to show].

Wendy Bartlett 44:33

Murray just put some things that we've done if you just want to read his chat - he has some specific examples that may help you. Oh, brilliant.

Rob Liddiard 44:42

Ah - Murray from Bartlett Mitchell's posted ‘voting for options for company events to get engagement works well’. So, actively encouraging colleagues to be involved in the decision making of the business.

The reason that's effective is we all want 1000 likes on day one, right? But it doesn't necessarily happen that way.

When you actively engage colleagues and let's say the first 15, 20, 25 30% engage, if you then take a meaningful social or company action on the basis of that initial group's feedback, what that does is it creates a virtuous loop - because all of those other people who just couldn't be bothered to participate the first time round now aren't being included or have not had their voice heard in the same way.

Wendy Bartlett 45:45

When we organised a party, we gave them three options: Friday night, Saturday night with partners and so on. Anyway, it ended up being a Friday night. I think it was all set up - yeah, Friday night.

And it was quite interesting because when people said ‘that didn't suit me’ their colleagues would say - not me, their colleagues said - ‘you didn't vote on Yapster, so you don't get a say’. So that works really well.

Rob Liddiard 47:05

Yeah, it takes a lot of confidence to do that. But that is the right way to do it. Thank you Murray and thank you for the questions Cristiano.

So, just to finish we're coming up to the maximum time we promised I'm just going to scroll back through the newsfeed... and this is really funny. People will think I staged this because it is way too spooky. It’s spooky to me too.

This is a picture of me [on the Bartlett Mitchell newsfeed from today], walking back up my staircase in East London. Look, you can see the shopping bag in my left hand - so essential shopping. I am staying home and saving the NHS.

But what was really cool is this guy - keeping his two meters away from me - held the door for me as I walked in, and because I'm an infant I wear, you know, like teenager clothes all the time, including my Yapster logo swag.

So, he saw the Yapster logo and he said to me, ‘oh’, pointing at my breast and said, do you know Bartlett Mitchell? We use that app, how come you’ve got the logo on there?

And he posted [a photo of me along with], ‘look who I spotted on the stairs to my friend's building’. And then he's mentioned me and I've obviously reacted because I try to follow Wendy's lead.

And we're now directly engaging too.

Wendy Bartlett 49:38

Good. I was really interested that he’s a Kitchen Porter too. So the kitchen Porter is normally the guy out the back with his hands in water, washing the pans. So that is the kitchen Porter engaging. So that is fantastic and that he knew about Yapster.

Rob Liddiard 50:01

No, it was really, it was really cool. I mean, it was obviously exciting. Totally exciting for me. But I thought it was a lovely endorsement that the BM family is not just a hashtag on a slide deck.

Wendy Bartlett 50:11

And it's not just about managers. It's about everybody.

Rob Liddiard 50:15

Yeah, I completely agree. Well, Wendy, thank you for being so generous with the data. And I'm sure there'll be more thoughts that come in afterwards. And I'll obviously share those on the email list afterwards. So thank you, Wendy Bartlett, and thank you everybody, for joining.

Wendy Bartlett 50:31

Thank you very much. Thank you.