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Sep 01
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10 Reasons why Employees should be able to Generate Corporate Contents (II)

By | Transmedia Storytelling, Leadership, Innovation
In the first post about Employee Generated Content strategy (EGC) I introduced the need to review the role of the employee as regards their participation in certain fields of corporate strategy. In this one, I’ll give you 10 reasons why it is worth doing it.

Letting employees participate in a certain way in the changes proposed by the organisation (regardless of whether they are related to values, conducts and behaviours or with any aspect dealing with the way to work or to behave within the company), or even giving them the chance to co-create some aspects of the corporate management or communication, has a lot of benefits.

Here are the 10 reasons:

1. Motivation

A high percentage of employees are eager to collaborate with the change, to give it shape and to boost it, to be part of it; and they have a lot to say about it and about the way to promote it.When they get the chance (important: a real chance, no tricks, transparent) to co-create, you create a strong emotional connection with the company, a shared motivation.EGC is a proof of trust and empowerment, which leaves no employee indifferent.

2. Identification of the most engaged employees

Sometimes it is complicated to identify the employees with high engagement levels.When you allow your employees to create their own contents, it becomes much easier to identify and to monitor the engagement levels.It allows you to make out those who stopped being motivated at a specific moment in time, probably due to a “difficult” and rather impervious leadership.Overcoming invisible barriers and silos to find sleeping passions and reconnect them.

3. Making the people of the organisation visible

In large companies it is not always obvious who does what, or how do other colleagues look like.When employees get the chance to create their own content, they are able to present themselves and connect with their colleagues.This increases the possibility for employees to meet each other, and what is more important, it opens the door to future collaborations.

4. Discovering the stars of communication

Empowering your employees with the chance to create corporate content allows you to discover written or audiovisual communication talents and, what is even more important, to discover what they know.This is especially important to break the barrier of shyness during meetings or the limitations of the impact of their own workplace.It allows us to find the Cinderellas of Communication in our companies.

5. Strengthening corporate proposals and internal communication

The proposals for the management of a corporate change and internal communications may undergo a certain distancing process or lack of anchoring with some internal realities, with the daily work of the employees.Opening the door to collective participation allows for a review and a connection with specific realities, to anchor, to improve, and to have direct feedback from the employees… which improves the proposals made from the corporate side.One of the best ways to improve internal communication is promoting (digital) sharing and dialog.

6. Increase of the Commitment to Corporate Topics

Employees who co-create and participate actively in the management of the corporate change, the corporate communication, etc. end-up becoming the best ambassadors, feeling responsible for the viralization of the changes.The responsibility to make the change happen or to make the information reach the most hidden corners of the company is shared with these co-participants of the project, who will be the first to defend it.

7. Emergence of Knowledge

There is a huge amount of knowledge in the minds of employees.They do not only offer a different perspective, but they also know and understand perfectly well both the customers and their brand.Unfortunately, many employees hoard this information and do not share it, even if they have no real intention to do so.It is just because most of the employees do not know how to share and distribute their knowledge.Opening spaces to share contents allows organizations to make emerge a huge amount of hidden information.

8. Creation of Marketing Material

Employee Generated Content allows generating valuable content that may even be used internally or externally as communication elements for company clients.The employees of a company are often “product specialists” who can provide for a unique and interesting view of the product as such. In addition, watching an employee defending the brand with passion transmits confidence and an emotional connection with the clients.

9. Cost reduction

Without having to do without departments dedicated to the management of the corporate change and internal communications, the fact of allowing employees to generate corporate content, especially since technological media have become more powerful, easier to use and affordable, allows to reduce the generation costs of contents for the brand which can later be used internally or externally.

10. Because fear has no rational foundation

The idea of letting employees talk, internally or externally, can be considered as a risk by the corporate leaders.The results have always shown us that these fears and excessive caution are unfounded.When you allow employees to generate content – in a transparent way and with clear rules- the results are surprisingly positive:those who make use of the chance to create and to share, feel that they have the responsibility to act in a positive way, and starting from corporate messages, they create new approaches, anchor or connect these messages with the reality of the daily life at the company, disseminate…

Sources::

Mainly Cookie Box experience, but also:

5 Benefits of Employee Generated Content

Beyond social media – A rough guide to Employee Generated Content in the travel industry

Five Tactics to Perfect Your Employee Generated Content

360 Brand Story Building

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Mar 03
0

Why the Torch methodology accelerates your innovation skills

By | Innovation
The answer is in your neurons

To understand why a methodology like Torch is so useful, let’s refer to chapter 2 of “The Torch Methodology” (The electric mind) and briefly explore one of the ways in which our brain works.

Think of your brain. One hundred billion neurons. Each of them can receive inputs from up to 20,000 different sources. The Torch Principle tells us that we can have over one million billion connections just in the cortex alone. That’s a lot of complexity, and to deal with so much complexity the brain has some tricks up to its sleeve.

Let’s try to summarize in simple ways a very complex topic. A neuron gets activated when it receives enough stimulation from a number of other neurons. That level of stimulation is a threshold that you need to reach.

Now, pay attention to this. Once that threshold is reached, it gets lowered, and that lowering of the threshold lasts for a certain time. What this means in practice is that during some time it will take less effort to activate that neuron again. Basically, the more often you activate a neuron, the easier it gets to activate it again (for a certain period of time).

Going into the scientific details, we are talking about a process known as LTP (Long Term Potentiation). Neurons contact with each other at their synapses. When neurotransmitters appear in the synaptic channel that connects an inactive and an active neuron, some of the pores of the membrane in the inactive neuron will open readily, but others, which are called NMDA receptor sites  (N-methyl-d-aspartate) are more difficult to open and will only do so if they receive stimulation for a long time. But once they open, they will respond to weaker signals for some time. Basically, they will be easier to activate for a certain period of time.

This is how we create habits and how we learn. That’s the positive side of it.

The dark side

But there is a dark side. The way these thresholds work, encourage the formation of patterns of activation and habits in our thinking. This is why we tend to think in directions that we have used before. And this is why it is so hard to change the way we think and behave, to get away of the typical mental patterns we regularly activate.

This is why we tend to think in directions that we have used before. And this is why it is so hard to change the way we think and behave, to get away of the typical mental patterns we regularly activate.

But, if instead you want to innovate and be creative in your professional and/or personal life, if you want to open new paths and ways of thinking, to deviate from the typical, to find solutions that are more original, that help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and that provide value that last for longer… then you need to find a way to deal with what we have described above.

When your analytical muscles are much stronger than your creative ones (typical in most adults), that is, when your capacity to reactivate already known mental patterns is much bigger than your capacity to open brand new ones, innovation and creativity suffer.

Torch to the rescue

Torch provides a methodology with strategies, techniques, exercises and tools specially designed to strengthen and exercise your creative muscles , that is, your ability to generate brand new paths and routes in your mind that deviate from the typical ones.

By doing that, Torch helps you reach a better balance between your analytical and creative strategies (both of them are equally important). This accelerates your capacity to innovate and generate more disruptive ideas and solutions that can put you ahead of your competitors and keep you there.

Javier Ideami

Founder of Torch

 

For more info on that:

Contact us at info@cookiebox.es with any further question or to arrange a Torch event for your company, institution or group.

The Torch Principle book: https://www.amazon.com/Torch-Principle-Light-Your-Mind/dp/0997247703

The Torch Methodology website: http://torchprinciple.com

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Feb 16
0

From Silicon Valley to Cookie Box

By | Innovation
At Cookie Box we’re happy to announce our collaboration agreement with Ideami Studios, led by Javier Ideami, the author of Torch Methodology which accelerates innovation and achieves more creative and divergent solutions that allow companies to generate solutions and insights that go beyond the typical and predictable ones.

Torch methodology accelerates and boosts the divergent phases of innovation processes, helping companies adapt to today´s markets, where innovation processes need to be as fast and original as possible if companies want to stay ahead of their competitors.

The Torch methodology, developed in Silicon Valley, blends the best from Design Thinking and Lean and adds a new multi-disciplinary and multisensorial ideation methodology on top. This new ideation methodology includes a wide range of tools and strategies specifically created to train your creative muscles and boost the ideation phase.

Through all the potential that creativity, divergence and multidisciplinary and multisensory strategies offer, Torch allows you to reach a better balance with analytical strategies, which have dominated corporate processes for a long time. These new techniques expand your horizons, opening new paths based on the combination of conscious and subconscious exploration, working in more unpredictable and organic ways. Later on, these processes converge onto practical and viable solutions.

This collaboration takes place through multiple options:

  1. Events for corporations, individuals and institutions, focused on the ideation stage or the whole innovation process.

  2. An online platform that keeps your creative muscles fit. It includes videos, tools, apps, infographics, workbooks and publications.

  3. Presential and remote training, one to one and for groups.

  4. Torch Creative Gyms. A blend of the physical and virtual that strengthens your creative muscles and produces innovative solutions for your organization (under construction)

  5. Libro: The Torch Principle, to internalize the key principles of Torch and train on your own.

If you want to know more about Torch methodology: http://torchprinciple.com/

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Jul 11
0

Cookie Box, member of JamTodayEu

By | Innovation, Gamification
Cookie Box joins JamToday EU, a European Union platform which supports the creation, implementation and development of learning and educational games and dynamics, creating methods and tools and supplying a hub of central resources ready to use for the organizations that take part in it, ensuring the development of a collective intelligence related with co-creation dynamics and open search of business solutions.

For that, Jam Today network gathers persons and organizations involved in the process of designing and implementing gamified learning-based solutions, applicable in BussinesJams workshops such as CookieJams, hackathons, etc.

Oscar García-Pañella, one of CookieBox partners, among other international collaborators explains us all about it. Check out the video.

If you want to know more, check JamTodayEU.

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