Pecan news – Autumn 2021

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

Cracking Culture Change: our brand new podcast 

We are so excited to have launched our Cracking Culture Change podcast, bringing you real-world stories and insights to help you “crack” your culture. Our first episode is with the fantastic Monique Choudhuri, who – among other things – is a Non-Executive Director at Brentford Football Club and a Board Director at Women In Football.  

Monique shares what it’s like to be a woman at the senior levels of Premiership football, and the practical steps Brentford FC are taking to help it achieve its vision of being the most inclusive club in the UK. She describes the importance of having the whole leadership team on board and of “seeking first to understand”. 

You can listen to the episode with Monique here: Cracking Culture Change podcast

We’d love to hear your thoughts – and do get in touch if you’ve got a story you’d like to share. New episodes are released fortnightly. Register to make sure you don’t miss one! 

BOOST: supporting school students to re-find their mojo

Here at Pecan, it really matters to us that we support our communities and ‘give back’ wherever we can. So, it has been great to have been working with a large secondary school in Manchester over the last term, on a pro-bono basis.  

We have been supporting Year 11 students through our BOOST programme. BOOST is a five-stage programme, targeted at students who have lost their mojo during lockdown and – with a bit of additional support – can really strengthen their belief in themselves and maximise their potential. 

The programme aims to help students: 

• Feel in control of maximising their potential
• Feel confident and motivated 
• Strengthen their belief in themselves 
• Be inspired to use a range of techniques to stay productive, mentally and physical healthy, and build a support network 

With the school, we’ve been measuring the impact on students’ confidence, engagement and motivation, and over the longer-term, the impact on their achievement. Keep an eye on our Linkedin and Twitter pages for updates about how it’s going as we approach the end of the first term.

NHS Estates & Facilities: great steps towards building a collaborative culture and a new identity

In our last newsletter we described some of the work Pecan are doing to support the Estates and Facilities team in a large NHS Trust to break down silos following a merger and create a greater culture of belonging.  

We’re now working with the team to help them implement the priority actions. Here’s Pecan’s Director Ella explaining more in this short video.

Other key client highlights

Autumn has been a busy time for us. As well as our work with the NHS Trust and our BOOST school programme, we’ve been supporting UK and global clients with culture diagnostics, fine-tuning their hybrid working approach, and the development of diversity and inclusion strategies and toolkits. 

For one client, a multi-national logistics and supply chain company, we’re currently developing a ‘day-to-day inclusion toolkit’. The toolkit will help embed inclusion as a daily priority in every role, at every level, and in every one of its 40+ country offices. It’s a hugely exciting product which will have real practical value for teams, managers and leaders – whilst supporting their organisation-wide aim to enable their people to achieve their full potential. We’ll bring you more on this in our next newsletter.

Recent insights

Read some of Pecan’s latest Insights here: 

• Overwhelm in the workplace 
• Performance management in a hybrid environment 

What would you like us to write about next? Let us know by getting in touch. 

More inspiration

• What we’re reading – Matt Haig’s ‘The Midnight Library’
• What we’re watching – Kim Scott and Trier Bryant’s short video on ‘How to reduce biases in your workplace’
• What we’re listening to – the Cracking Culture Change podcast, of course!

A final word

Wishing you all the very best for the rest of the year, and a happy and peaceful Christmas season. We’d love to hear what you enjoyed in this newsletter, or what you’d like us to include in future editions. Please share it to anyone who might find it useful, and if you’ve received a forwarded version you can sign up for further updates here.