Purple Patch Blog

Marketing Manager – join the Purple Revolution

If you’re reading our blogs you’re already interested in learnpurple. Here’s an opportunity to join us.

learnpurple is a searching far and wide for a second- or third-role graduate marketer looking to cut their teeth in a funky business. Over the past nine years we’ve created one of the most innovative and exciting business services organisations in town. We help cool brands like Malmaison, Pizza Express and Diesel, to engage, develop and retain the talented people they need to grow.

This is a new position for us and we're looking for the perfect match. Are you ready to take our brand to the world and come back with new opportunities and prospects for our team to develop?

Continue reading 3 September 2010

Talent intelligence a top issue for business – time to take action

How service organisations can better manage their biggest asset, by Jane Sunley.

In today’s knowledge economy, as much as 70 percent of an organisation's value is based on the skills, experience, and performance of the employees¹. However the majority of companies do not have a system in place which provides easily accessible visibility as to the metrics around their ‘human capital’².

If this ‘talent intelligence’ is not readily available, organisations will be unable to adequately manage business, team and individual performance. From a strategic standpoint, it’s a bit like planning investments without access to the balance sheet.

In today’s business where customers want things better, faster and more tailored, only those organisations that become experts at talent management will be able to create competitive advantage.

According to a recent study by Towers Watson, talent / performance systems were ranked as the top issue by the largest margin ever in their 13 years of survey history.

Last month Taleo published a paper on talent intelligence. Here are their key findings:

Continue reading Comments (1) 2 September 2010

Assertiveness: the art of striking a happy medium

Sally Brand discusses assertiveness.

Assertiveness is a skill that many of us would like to be more adept at.

Assertive behaviour enables us to be more efficient, builds self-confidence and helps us to manage our lives and stress. However, being assertive is not always that easy and we can all find it hard to communicate openly at times. For instance, in all honesty, how many times have you said “yes” to something when you really should have said “no”?!

Lack of assertiveness can lead to passive or aggressive behaviour. Both of which can create a bad atmosphere and be counter-productive (this is not great for strong employee engagement levels!) There is a myth that to be assertive you need to be aggressive. In reality, this is not the case and your behaviour should not undermine others. The trick is to get the right balance. It’s important to believe in yourself and clearly put your views forward to get your message across, but at the same time you need to be respectful of others. Otherwise your ‘assertive’ behaviour could really just be a form of bullying.

Taking all this into consideration, here are some top tips to help you put this into practice (and hopefully make life that little bit easier!):

Continue reading Comments (0) 23 August 2010

Creating clear blue water

MJ Flanagan discusses a crystal clear strategy for creating competitive advantage.

I have been asked recently what makes learnpurple stand out. Why should we be the learning provider of choice? It made me analyse what we do and how we do it. What gives us - or would give - us competitive advantage?

It is a question every business should ask itself on a regular basis, with customers ever more discerning and demanding: “How will you differentiate yourself from your competitors?”

According to Professor Arnoldo Hax from MIT Sloan it is about watching the competitors -not following them. He describes it as playing a different game, but on the same field as the competition.

If we are to believe W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne who wrote the book 'Blue Ocean Strategy', the only way to beat the competition is not to try and beat them but to look at your own product or service and rewrite the rulebook. Dyson did this brilliantly with the vacuum cleaner. Despite my years of calling all vacuums ‘Hoovers’ he has successful redefined that, so much so my son calls a Hoover a Dyson - and we do not even own one.

Continue reading Comments (1) 16 August 2010

Increase employee engagement in one simple step

Jo Harley on how developing your managers can lead to an increase in engagement.

It’s a year since we launched our free engagement survey (click here to set yours up) and therefore a year since we first completed it ourselves; time to practice what we preach and run it again to see how things have changed. You’d think that specialising in the areas of employee engagement, best places to work, retention and development we’d be scoring a whopping 10 out of 10. However there are always improvements that can be made and we were pleased with our rather respectable score of 8.5 (especially as this was 1.5 points up on last year –phew!) Compared to all the organisations that have taken part since we launched (over a thousand people) we compare very favourably as the average score is five out of a possible ten.

A recent poll by Gallup states that 24% of people are not engaged in their job at present, which reflects similar studies by Blessing White and the Corporate Leadership Council. Although they found that that the number of actively disengaged had doubled from 20% of the workforce in 2008 to 40% in 2009 which is very worrying and presents an opportunity to make improvements.

Continue reading Comments (1) 28 July 2010