If a building could talk, of what would it speak? The answer is that buildings do talk, they communicate very effectively but how, why and to what purpose is not well understood. Workplace branding in its broadest context can be an essential and valuable part of a company’s communication strategy.

The corporate brand is perhaps the best understood and managed of a firm’s intangible assets. Many firms include brand value on their balance sheets though relationship capital, for example, has rarely been treated that way. One reason is that it is apparently obvious that the marketing team are responsible for it.

A well-conceived strategy will always help you to make the most of your resources and the fascination with strategy is long standing, as readers of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” written in 5th Century BC will know. Sometimes in history however events transpire to change the strategic landscape and at those times the skills of the strategist are at a premium.

We started working with our first charity client, the Alzheimer’s Society, in 2015. It is one of the UK’s largest, boasting over 2.5 million ‘Dementia Friends’ and thousands of volunteers, all of whom are integral to the delivery of the society’s service proposition. Their vision is ‘a world without dementia'.

We had worked with BP on their commercial strategy and the development of service income, and through that relationship got talking to another part of their organisation about plans they had for an office reorganisation in Swindon.

The Workplace Intelligence Unit (WIU) was an idea hatched by us with the then UK MD Jeremy Hocking and his Marketing Director Mark Catchlove at Herman Miller.

During the four years I have been at forward thinking inc, I have had the privilege to work with some great client brands across a range of sectors.

We began working with Orange in 2000, before the France telecom takeover and in the midst of the dot com boom. They were a fast-growing business with a great collection of talent working in their brand and commercial functions and great fun to work with.

September 23rd 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of forward thinking inc. At the time, my idea was to do great work for great clients with great people, and that’s certainly turned out to be the case.

Why do we work? This is a question that has persistently vexed the minds of psychologists. The fundamental need to earn money in order to sustain ourselves and our loved ones is the foundation of the Maslovian pyramid, therefore it perforce fills most of our waking hours. It is a simple transitional, need-driven, transactional process.

We have observed that the current fashion for engagement surveys may not be working for the organisations or employees they are designed to serve. To address the issue it is necessary first to be very clear about what they are designed to achieve. Only then can the strategy behind the survey be evaluated effectively.

Leaders in politics and business have never appeared more distant from those they lead. Achieving a higher level of engagement is a pressing need, but is an engagement survey the answer?

Toby Hartwell, Director at forward thinking inc, explains how BBC Monitoring has been making sense of world events for 80 years.

Andrew Hill writing in his column, ‘On Management’ for the Financial Times commented on a visit to the Director’s Forum in Vienna where fans of the late Peter Drucker voiced fears about the way data is wielded to crush human insight and inventiveness.

We recently moved to new offices after over ten years at our previous home in Richmond. A lease break offered us the chance to consider other options and we decided to move to a modern and flexible office environment, where we can interact with a range of other companies and have access to spaces in other major cities in the UK and around the world.

Nearly every client we have or business we analyse is keen to create greater collaboration. They are concerned that their organisation is siloed and feel that raising the incidence and quality of collaboration will drive improvements in creativity and productivity. There is also the expectation that it will make the workplace a more fun, rewarding and inviting place to be.

At the recent AVEX conference at the NEC in Birmingham, our COO, Toby Hartwell, presented a new perspective on the office of the future and its implications for facilities management. The work is part of a bigger research project undertaken by forward thinking that has explored the rapid transformation the workplace of today is undergoing.

It is well understood that the human dynamics within an organisation are critical to performance and help drive long-term value. Human dynamics as a field includes key variables such as employee productivity and engagement, strength of community, attraction and retention, culture, leadership, performance management and even innovation.