Welcome to our summer newsletter, bringing you news and insights into some of our most recent client work and the latest trends in culture, change and performance.

Before we jump into that, we thought we’d share some internal analysis about our work so far this year. Our most popular service remains Culture Change that Sticks, but it’s great to also see significant demand for our Diverse and Inclusive Cultures and Healthy Performing Teams services. You can see a summary of all our services on our website.

Supporting inclusion through Employee Resource Groups

We’ve recently been helping a global logistics provider to build the capability of their Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). If you’re not familiar with ERGs, they’re groups formed by employees who share a common characteristic (for example, ethnicity or sexuality). Among other things, the groups provide support, increase representation, and enhance career development for their members.

The leadership teams of the organisation’s six ERGs are benefitting from a bespoke leadership development programme. Pecan Partnership are proud to be delivering modules relating to wellbeing, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, inclusive leadership and team-building skills.

It is brilliant to be part of helping the group members share best practice and ideas, and to see an organisation place its people at the centre of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy, by investing in the groups’ leadership capability.

“Pivotal” support in First Recruitment Group’s culture transformation

We’re thrilled that one of Pecan’s clients, First Recruitment Group, was nominated for consideration as part of HR Zone’s Culture Pioneer Awards. The Group started their culture journey in 2020, with a Pecan culture review. We gathered insight into the prevailing traits, unwritten rules and causes of the current culture through focus groups, interviews and a short survey. This gave the organisation an objective view of what was working well within their culture, and what needed to evolve.

Building on this, the Group refreshed their mission and values – shaped by input and ideas from colleagues across the business. They then implemented a series of initiatives to help embed these values in how they operate, and really make them stick.  We also ran a leadership development programme for the senior team, to help the leadership team build self-awareness, and role model the values and behaviours they want to see across the organisation.

First Recruitment Group say Pecan’s support has been “pivotal” in their transformation. Throughout, we’ve brought our deep expertise and our flexible, can-do approach. It’s a perfect example of our ‘light touch, lasting impact’ value. Unfortunately, the Group narrowly missed out on being Culture Pioneer finalists but – nonetheless – they’re superstars in our eyes!

Boosting young people’s resilience and productivity

We’ve recently concluded and evaluated a pro-bono resilience and productivity programme with a large secondary school, helping to engage and energise a group of Year 11 students to maximise their potential. The programme, called BOOST, included modules to help students identify their personal values and sources of motivation, understand their spheres of influence and mindset, and build their emotional intelligence, resilience and time management skills.

It has been fantastic working with the students. We were particularly impressed by the level of engagement, and the maturity with which students connected with the tools and techniques. More importantly, the pre- and post-intervention survey results show a significant improvement in students’ ability to feel confident and motivated, be productive, practice healthy habits and build support networks.

Feel free to get in touch if you know of a comprehensive secondary that might benefit in the forthcoming academic year.

Partnering with Engage Solutions to bring even more value

We’re excited to have announced a new partnership with Engage Solutions Group. We’re bringing our skills and services together to help even more organisations accelerate change adoption and drive customer, community and colleague engagement. Engage has a proven track record in delivering digital engagement apps for both internal and external audiences, working with clients across the UK and beyond.

It promises to be a great match, bringing together Pecan’s frameworks and skills to fundamentally shift ‘the way we do things around here’, with Engage’s digital tools to keep it simple and speed up change adoption. We’ll bring further updates on the partnership through this newsletter and our Linkedin channel.

More inspiration

• What we’re reading: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• What we’re watching: Margaret Heffernan’s TED talk, Forget The Pecking Order At Work about the importance of social connection
• What we’re listening to: Visible Women with Caroline Criado Perez

A final word

Thanks for reading our summer newsletter. We hope you’ve got plans to relax and recharge at some point over the summer. We’re doing so too, in particular so we’re energised and ready to celebrate Pecan Partnership’s 10^th birthday in the autumn. We can’t wait!

If there are topics you’d like us to cover in future editions, please do let us know.  Also, please share it with anyone who might find it useful. If you’ve received a forwarded version you can sign up for further updates here.