Humanising Workplaces: Transforming Business Communication
Exploring the human essence of business, Joanne Lockwood and guest Ben Afia redefine workplace communication and customer engagement in a touching conversation on The Inclusion Bites Podcast.
Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for theInclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number ofamazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject ofinclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better placefor everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then pleasedo drop me a line tojo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk,that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot UK. Youcan catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify andthe usual places. So plug in your headphones, graba decaf and let's get going. Today isepisode 102 with the title HumanisingBusiness and I have the absolute honour and privilegeto welcome Ben Afia. Ben describes himself as someonewho makes business more human, and when I asked Ben to describe hissuperpower, he said he has a particular sensitivity tothe nuances of language. Hello, Ben, welcometo the show. Thank you for having me, Jo,
Ben Afiaguest
it's an absolute pleasure. Yeah, we've been having a great chat in the green room
Joanne Lockwoodhost
and I'm so looking forward to thishumanising business. What does that mean? Yeah, it's quite
Ben Afiaguest
a bold statement, isn't it? I suppose, but it's been my missionfor possibly the last 2025 years.I've really started focusing on language, in particular, when I was atBoots, the chemists, about 25 years ago, and I got to workon the first brand tone of voice. We were working on brand strategy,the tone of voice and language of the business. And in anylarge organisation, you've got a level of complexityand dehumanising, if you like, because you've got a lot of people,so you have process and you've got bureaucracy and politics, and that allgets in the way of relationships inside theorganisation and that gets in turn in the way ofrelationships outside. So with customers. So atBoots, I was trying to help the organisation to relate to customers in
Ben Afiaguest
the way that they want to be related to, the way they would want tobe spoken to. And then when I set up my consultancy about 19and a half, nearly 20 years ago, I found myselfcoming across organise other organisations who had similar problems. So I worked with companieslike BP, Vodafone, Aviva, Google,and I found a similar pattern that these larger businesses, just becausethey're large, they have certain issues that get in the way of beinghuman. And what's the impact of that? Well,certainly when I was an employee, I felt slightly dehumanised,actually. Boots was a wonderful place to work. But I worked in some lesswonderful places before that. Many people have this sense of workingfor the man and that being a dehumanisingexperience. So if we feel treated less than humaninternally, how does that reflect in the way that we treat ourcustomers? And it's that connection that I'm really intrigued about.And what I've learned, I suppose, through all the work, that all the consulting thatI've done with various clients, is that in orderto change the relationship you have with your customers, you need to change the relationshipwith your people internally first. So that's the nub of it,I'd say. I like that. I like that nuance. And we
Joanne Lockwoodhost
see that echoed in, you say the companies you've worked for, theairline industry changed the way they operated many years ago as well,we can probably imagine. I see on LinkedIn every day, people get reallyfrustrated with computer says no, or whoever you talk to.I appreciate you're not necessarily talking about customer service here, you're talking about how youcommunicate. But sometimes you get a letter and it feels like you'rebeing, I don't know, criticised or attacked orsued in a correspondence that should be friendly and warm. Butthat warmth never comes through, does it? Absolutely. And to
Ben Afiaguest
that extent, yes. I am talking about customer service, because what isa business? A business has products and servicesthat it sells to an audience. That might be a business audience ora consumer audience, or both in many cases. So ultimately,we're creating something that serves a need for people, andpeople will buy that or not. Andso that's where the sense of customer service comes in.Because when you get through the selling and the marketingcommunication, it's the customer service that really matters. Do youdeliver what you promise in your marketing, through your service?And all of those tiny moments, allthroughout a customer's journey, are absolutely crucial inshaping a customer's perception of what you're like as anorganisation and what you believe in, what you stand for. So every one
Ben Afiaguest
of those letters, every one of that, and I look at the kind of themicro copy on websites, the form that you fill in when you make apurchase, or the terms and conditions when they come through at the bottom of theemail, when you've bought something, all the contractual stuff is allevidence to a customer of what you stand for, what you believein. And as a business, it's a promise. It's all part of your promise.What's really interesting is that most organisations spend a lot of time andmoney investing in the marketing and thesales pitch and aren't necessarily following that through inthe rest of the journey, which is when you really learnwhether you can trust their organisation and whether you're prepared to stay with them. Andthe end result of that for me is, and all theevidence shows that companies that deliver ontheir promise and turn customers into advocates,people who come back and buy more and bring their friends withthem refer are more profitable. And I was just listening to awebinar the other day with Fred Reichld, who created the mps netpromoter score system at Bain and Company 25,30 years ago or something, and his latest book,winning on purpose, I think it is. And he has great case studies.He talks about T Mobile in the US in particular, who were at the bottomfor customer service, who then really spent time focusing onturning customers into advocates and referrals andbecame the top for customer service and then for profitabilityamongst all the mobile networks in the US. So there is really compellingevidence that treating people like human beings,humanising for your people and for your customers, works. It's quite
Joanne Lockwoodhost
easy for you and I, we're solopreneurs, we run our own microbusinesses. Our tone of voice is inherent ineverything we do because it's basically only ourselves speaking.I like what you're saying there. It's thinking about all those subtletouch points and nuances. I worked with amutual friend of ours, Sarah Fox, on my terms and conditions recently, and whenI wrote them originally, I wrote them with my bouncing ball on thewords in my head so that they actually sound like me. And I wasvery keen. I didn't want them to sound distant,detached, legal. I wanted them to sound warm and friendlylike, this is what I'm thinking. I hope you're thinking the same thing. This issomething that I'm worried about. This is something you'll be worried about. I want usto work together and come up with a collaborative solution. If it doesn't work out,let's have a chat about it was kind of my approach. And what do Imean by this? I mean this and it's written in that very friendly, chattylanguage, which is my internal head voice. Andthat's what I asked Sarah to keep going. I don'tcall them terms, I call them my expectations of our relationship.And she followed that through. And I think you're so right.Everything I do has to have my bouncing ball in myhead of how I speak on the words as I speak it, and it hasto have my cadence, my rhythm, my bounce, all those. But when you work fora corporate, the challenge is they're so big, so large,who has that internal voice that you're trying to match and how do youcommunicate? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there
Ben Afiaguest
are some, although few businesses, maybe like virgin,and they can imagine a person at Virgin, they can imagine Richard Bransonspeaking, and there's the voice. But for most large businesses, you don'tnecessarily have a publicly known figurehead that you can lean on in thatway. So you do need to find a way of describing that voice ina way that the people using it can apply. And Isuppose that's what I've done a lot of in the last 20 years orso, is helping an organisation to develop its strategy and itsbrand strategy, in particular values and behaviours,and translate that into ways of speakingand writing that people who don't have englishdegrees can relate to and actually employ. Now, you might call thattone of voice guidelines, perhaps, which is something I've done a lot of over theyears. But those people who are connecting with yourcustomers, first of all, your marketing teams, and if you'reVodafone, you have hundreds, if not thousands of marketers, you then have tens ofthousands of people in customer service, potentially, and you havesalespeople dealing with customers in stores, on thephone or in b to b going out to see corporates.So you've got thousands of people representing the brand day in, dayout. So how do you help the ethos or the story of the brand comethrough consistently? And that's, I guess, what I've been really interestedin, because we don't want to turn people into puppets, we're not trying to turnpeople into drones and get people scriptingand repeating the same phrases. I actuallystrongly believe in help, in empowering people and in equippingpeople to bring their own voice into it. And what I've foundis that when people feel more confident in the waythat you want to say things as an organisation and the messages that you wantthem to bounce off, they actually become much moreconfident communicators and they will reflect the brandwith confidence, naturally. So partly is about definition anddefining things, in defining the tone of voice, but then it'salso about developing the skills, the capability forpeople. And quite often in business, we use language day in, day out. Wewrite all the time, don't we? We write emails, wewrite web pages, we write pieces of marketing in customerservice. We're on web chat, or we're writing letters to customers.And how often have we had training? Quite often. I'll go into an organisation andthere's been very little training in writing. It's almost the assumption that you'velearned to write at school, so you ought to be able to do it. Butactually, no, there's a way of writing in business that isactually different. And it's interesting. My daughter is about to do her alevels. She's doing english literature, and I almost can't coach her becausethey've been taught to write at school in a way that actuallyis. They've been taught to use adjectives in a way that I never would inbusiness, because we aim for simplicity and clarity and humanity inbusiness. And it's almost like at school they're being taught something else, and then inacademia, it's even worse. Yeah, don't talk to me about academia.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
I was doing an MVQ and I couldn'thandle the assignments because every time I had it moderated, it wassaying, no, you have to write like this. Have to write like that. And Isaid, no, I can't write this without filler words. I can't write thiswithout my voice in it. You want me to strip it down toshort, factual sentences? That's not me. No.
Ben Afiaguest
What this makes me think of is the perceptions that we have of the waythat we should write. So we grow up in whatever environmentwe do, learning a way that we're taught towrite. We should write the way that we should sound. And so we sortof enter the workplace with lots of assumptionsthat have been drummed into us as if they're rules of grammar and they're notactually rules of grammar. So a good example is startinga sentence with and but because or so now, ifyou read most newspapers, you'll find that they do that a lot. I think theGuardian doesn't, but most newspapers just do that with abandon and you don'teven notice. But in business writing, it's almost as if we've been taught thatthat's not correct. And people have this idea embedded in their brains
Ben Afiaguest
as if it's a rule of grammar, but it's not. It's actually a stylerule. And style emerged. I don't want to get toodistracted on too much of a tangent here, but style emerged in the victorianperiod when people were coming into the citiesin the victorian period looking for work, they were coming off the fieldsand looking for jobs in the factories, when in the industrialrevolution and things were booming in the factories, people were coming in andstarting businesses, earning money, and you had thisemerging middle class coming in from the villages,but there were people who didn't feel very confident in communicating,in conveying themselves in polite society. Soyou had a whole raft of out of work actors whowere turning their hand to creating these style guides to help theaspiring middle class to sound poshure. And this is where a lotof these rules of grammar that we perceive and have become embedded in the lastkind of couple of hundred years, but they're actually matters of style, and what theywere writing were these style guides. So we have this hangover in businessthat we should have a certain formality, but actually, our businesslanguage, certainly in Britain, to theUS, to some extent, Australia as well, has become lessformal. So the Internet in the last 2025 years ago or so, hasactually brought in different styles of communication, differentforms of language. If you think that we came into the Internet age writingformal letters, and we now have text andWhatsApp and telegram and all sorts of apps, where we message in a much moreimmediate form, and what that's done is it's brought a style ofspeech into our writing. And so now, if we writein the traditional letter way, as organisations tend to,or we feel that we should, in business, actually, customers and thepublic at large find, feel that actually, that's rather over formal,and that puts a barrier up. And I did some work with legal ingeneral, 1819, years ago, not long after I'd startedfreelancing, and they had done a piece of discourse analysis thathighlighted that actually, this language, this formal insurancelanguage, was putting a barrier up between them and customers. And that was thespark, that was the catalyst for them to make somechanges. As you were speaking, I was listening to the way you were constructing
Joanne Lockwoodhost
your sentences and the words, and you were using the word andsequentially, in a way that you would never use that if you werewriting a letter or writing a document, because you just wouldn't have.And this and that and this and that, you'd almost forceyourself to shorten that sentence and start againwithout the third. And because you just look at it and go, that doesn't seemright, but when you were speaking it, you were linkingparagraphs and sentences with, and listeningto it, it sounded relaxed and normal and typical conversation.So is it a challenge trying to turn the writtenword into the internal voice of the person, readingit in a way that they can understand it and pick upthe same feeling in which it was given onto the page?
Ben Afiaguest
I think it is, yeah, that's a really good point, Jo. So,quite often, what I'm trying to help people to do in organisations is tobe more themselves and more conversationally themselves. Sowhen I'm working with marketers, it's actually a bit morestraightforward because there's a distance off generally between them and thecustomer, so they have time to think and to think about what's going into theiradvertising or into their social media or onto awebsite. So they've got time to consider and they can work as ateam to bring more of their spoken voice intoplay. It's slightly different in customer service because in customer serviceoften people have been taught certain ways that they've picked up in various trainingover the years, but often that training hasn't been very comprehensive, so theydon't have that much confidence in being themselves. I canremember running a workshop in Aeon, so Ihelped Aeon transition from Powergen to Aeon must,what was it, 15 years ago? Or something like that. I worked with Aeon forabout eight years, I think, and we went through that transition.My team and I trained about 4000 people there and I can remembera workshop with some very senior customer service people. And theywere translating a letter, they were looking at a letter and they were reallystruggling to get the clarity into the tone of voice that I was trying toencourage. The clarity and the informality, notnecessarily chattiness, because I don't think customers want that and certainlynot from an energy provider. So it's not a chattiness, but a moreconversational human tone helps somebody. It expresses, forme, expresses empathy. It shows somebody that you've heard them, asimplicity and a clarity and empathy that shows that you've heard.And I can remember there was a couple working together and I suggested, andthey were really struggling to get through their kind oflegalistic language, the formality. So I said,why don't you say it as you would say it on the phone to thecustomer? So person a say it to person b as you would on thephone. Person B write down exactly the words that they say.And they wrote the words down. I said, there's your letter. They said, what? Wecan't say this. It's too simple, it's toonatural in a way. And I said, you absolutely. Can you tidy it up? Youedit it, you can turn that into a letter. But what you've done is you'vethen brought 25 plus years of experience looking aftercustomers to bear into that letter. And you've shown some empathy andyou've connected on a more human level. So for me, it is about havingempathy for the audience, what they're likely to take onboard in terms of a message and how they want to hear it and howthey're going to feel recognised as a human being, as. An individual is the challenge
Joanne Lockwoodhost
with that, though. Whilst we talked about having an avatar ofthe tone of voice. So Richard Branson Virgin is clearly a person you'retalking through, but do you have to try and find an avatarof the receiver? So the person is going to open that letter and that mustbe a massive challenge because of the multiculturalnuances of the person. Open the letter, their heritage,their lived experience, which part of the country, which part of the world, whichlanguage they speak. They're going to interpret things withtheir own bias or lived experience. And that must also be a challenge.
Ben Afiaguest
It is. And so there's two sides to that conversation, isn't there?There's the company. So what's the character of the company? And yeah, what's the characterof the person you're talking to? So let's take both in turn. So start withthe company. In the jargon, in the corporate speak or the marketing speak, Iwould call this brand personality. And there are all sorts of ways ofdescribing brand personality, but that's part of the kindof the process of developing a brand strategy and it needsto come from the values and it comes from the behaviours thatyou want to encourage through the organisation. Thepersonality is how that all comes across. So when youconnect with a customer or connect with somebody internally, how does thatconvey itself? What personality traits would you describe yourselfby? So that's the first stepand you can have some fun with that. The key is to try to bring
Ben Afiaguest
it to life in a way that enables people within theorganisation to project themselves onto it, to see themselves in thatpersonality. It needs to not be completely prescriptive. You can'ttell people how to be as a human being. You canencourage, but you can't force people. So you have to do it ina way that people will relate to and enjoy playingwith, enjoy working with and expressing. So that's the kind of the businessside of the conversation. But when it comes to the people that we'retalking to, I have an exercise that I've used for many years which I foundis really powerful for this. You've probably come across the idea ofaudience personas and I think that they can be misused in away, and can we really everdescribe one segment of an audience in a way thatmakes sense? There's all sorts of arguments about this and in fact,in my book that I'm hoping to be publishing within two or threemonths. The human business. How to love your customers sothey love you back. I have a chapter on brand personality, andI talk about this process of an exercise where I help people tostep into the personality of their audience. Sotrying not to be too prescriptive about audience personas, I runthis exercise where we use. It uses NLP neurolinguistic programming, andthere's this idea of perceptual position, so stepping into somebody else's shoes.So I get people into groups and I give them a communication.So we get some communications from within the organisation thatcould be better. Obviously, I'm generally looking forcommunications that are quite poor, but actually you don't need to look toofar within an organisation to find things that people want to improve.
Ben Afiaguest
And I get people to spend 20 minutes, 25 minutesscoping out, getting an idea of a character of one of the audience,somebody who might be receiving a letter or reading a web page or receiving anemail or something like that, or reading a social post. So give them a name,give them an age, imagine what they do, what's their family set up, where dothey live, what job do they do? And then imagine a day in their liferight from the moment they get up. Because I want people to have the ideathat when you're talking to your customers, when you're communicating with an audience of anykind, the context in which they're receiving a communicationis the whole of their life. It's almost like within business. We've got this ideathat when you're writing to somebody, they're in their business mindset or they're in theircustomer mindset, and it's obviously not true. Weget up, we walk the dog, we get the kids to school.We are panicked and stressed. The packed lunch didn't goquite as well. There was a traffic jam. Getting the kids toschool, you got to your office, or you got back to yourdesk at home and you're already fraught, and then you read thatletter or you get that email through. So when we imagine the whole of thislife context for a member of our audience, weimmediately have more empathy for that person. ThenI get them from that place of empathy to go, okay, in character, in audience,character. Now read the communication. How does it feel to you?What does it make you feel? And people go, I'm confused.Actually. It makes me angry. It's legalistic, it'sformal. I don't understand, I'm notclear. And immediately people know what they want to do differentlyimmediately in that place of empathy, they know what they want to dodifferently. And that's how I help them to step into an audience frame ofmind and appreciate what's going on for them. I love that. That's so true. I
Joanne Lockwoodhost
often use a similar example of that where, because we're readinga lot of communications now on our phones, we've goteven less control about where that person willpick up that correspondence, whether it's a text message, email, whatever it maybe. They could be sat on the toilet, as you say. They could be ina traffic jam, they could be just dropped the kids off at school havinga stressy moment and suddenly ping, they go, I'll just quickly readthat. And I've picked up communications andthere's nothing particularly wrong with the tone of voice or what was being sent tome, but my frame of mind was in completely the wrong place. I was notin the right place to receive that, no matter how good it was. What Ishould have done was turned my phone off. What happened was I read it andit then destroyed my mindset for the rest of the day. SoI'm looking at the other side sometimes is I'm getting stuff that I really shouldn'tread. But we have to appreciate when we're sending stuff, as youpointed out, we've got little control over the situation the person's in.
Ben Afiaguest
Absolutely. I've actually got quite an extreme example of that just at the moment. SoI'm working with a lovely norwegian consultancy calledDNV. They're 14,000 people. They're global. There are 119nationalities. So I'm thinking about translation and non nativeenglish speakers. I'm working on thepeople HR, intranet and LNd programmes andthat sort of stuff. And they have engineersand surveyors who are literally out on ships. So they dorisk and assurance globally. And so many oftheir people are going to be remote, they will be managing largeteams. They might be reading a communicationon a phone or a tablet. They probably have patchyInternet access. And I'm trying to encourage them tothink, okay, everything's got to be mobile, responsive, everything has got to be superconcise. We've got to be thinking about what's in it for our audience,not what do we want to communicate as a company. And this isclassic across all of the companies I've ever worked with, becauseI think it's human nature to have an idea of what we want tosay. And it's so much harder to think what do people actually want to hear?What do they want to receive? So what I'm encouraging in this situation, as Ialways do, is what's in it for our audience? What do they want tohear, and what way are they most likely to receive thatmessage? How are they likely to take it on board? How canwe help them to be open to our message? Because acommunication that doesn't land is not a communication. It's completely one sided. It'sdeaf ears. And how do you work with organisations where
Joanne Lockwoodhost
you may be trying to diffuse some conflict? Because sometimescorrespondence that goes bad ends up in conflict, ordisgruntlement or frustration or whatever it may be. So thecustomers may be responding to you in writing, via text, in thechat window, however they're going to communicate or on the phone, and there's conflict there,or there's escalation, there's anger, there's frustration.Do you have techniques to help people respond to that sort ofcommunication in a human fashion? Yes. I think the key to
Ben Afiaguest
that is leaning into thereality of the situation, the reality of the conflict,the nature of the conversation, or the nature of thenegotiation and being real and not trying to clothethings in legal and corporate speak. So what tends tohappen when we're in conflict is we default toways of speaking or ways of writing thatlegalistic or have a formality. We put a formality to it in order togive the language more gravitas. And that's understandable.That's human, that's normal. The problem withincreasing the formality of the language, which is what happens in conflict, isthat that then puts your counterparty'sbarriers up. That actually inspires them to react
Ben Afiaguest
negatively. The way to bring those barriersdown is to be more human. It's right to the start of the podcast wherewe talked about making business more human. It's to be more simple,more clear. Use Anglo saxonlanguage. What do I mean by that? So a lot of the language of theprofessions that arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066,so he brought French, French came fromLatin. And so a lot of the language ofauthority and the professions and power and controlhas a latin origin, and we end up with these longer words,which people don't trust, interestingly. So what the researchsuggests is that in British English, certainlypeople tend to trust shorter anglo saxon originwords, words like love and friends. I don't have any more examples there,actually. So shorter, simpler forms of words wetrust instinctively. And so this is what I'm trying to encourage people to dowhen they're communicating, whether it is strategic communication. Chiefexec or leaders communicating with theirboard, with their stakeholders, investors with their people,or whether it's in customer service, talking to customers. It's to simplify thelanguage and to get really specific about what you mean. And so whattends to happen is, when we're not feeling confident in conflict,we dress up our language in order to have an appearance ofmore confidence. It takes confidence to lean into what's actually going on inthe situation and to tackle it more directly and to use simple language. And thatactually then disarms people. It brings the temperature down,it brings blood pressure down, and it enables people to be morereceptive to what we're saying. As you're talking, I'm thinking about different
Joanne Lockwoodhost
dialects in the UK. And you look at, say,the traditional received pronunciation, theBBC language, the World Service language that the BBC had. You'reright, is all about authority. All around. These very formal languageconstructs sentences, long words, complicatedthings. I remember there was a musical showwhen I was little called the good old days, and they used to have thisannouncer on stage, the biggest words you could ever imagine, that no one knew whatthey meant, but everyone was whooping and cheering at them to make it sound impressive.And then you think about maybe a different part of the country. I'm just thinkingabout Yorkshire as a dialect and as a culture.People see people from Yorkshire as being warmer andfriendlier and, okay, hard, more hard nosednegotiations sometimes, but actually warmer and friendlier, where someone may be fromLondon or from the home counties as more businessy andstandoffish and less warm and friendly. So is thatjust the nature of the dialect and the language constructs maybeused outside of the city and more into the ruralareas? There's a lot of
Ben Afiaguest
interesting stuff going to unpack there. And I guessthe way I'd think about this is to think of language as beingtribal. And what I mean by that is, so we, you know,language. We use language to identify ourselves, weuse language to. To say which group we belongto, and we also use it. So we use language toinclude, and we use language to exclude. Soperhaps in the professions, language might be used to exclude,to say that we have special knowledge that you don't have access to,and you need us to interpret it for you. You need us in the legalprofession or an accountancy, for example. You need to pay
Ben Afiaguest
us good money in order to make sure you're on the straight and narrow, becauseonly we understand the language. And I think thathappens in corporations. So it's the language of leadership. Interestingly, Ifind quite often that the language of middle management is morecorporates than the language of very senior management. Quite often when I'mworking with very senior teams, with executiveteams, they are actually much more confident in simplifying their languagebecause they've achieved status already. So we have this idea oflanguage reflecting status and reflecting the tribe or the group, the ingroup, the out group. So if we think about language in thatway, we can go, well, how are we including or excluding people with ourlanguage? And so quite often people are using languageto exclude or to show that we have special knowledgeunconsciously. It's not necessarily a deliberate thing, but it's asubtle dance all of the time, all of the different subtletiesof class, of grouping within acountry, between countries, they have verysubtle nuances of inclusion and exclusion, and that's how we're usinglanguage. So if we're coming to using it using languagein business, I'm thinking, what is your purpose, what'syour intent towards your audience, whether it's internal orexternal, what's your intention behind your message? And then use thelanguage that's appropriate for that intention. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwoodhost
I've written four words down on my pad next to me. I'vewritten reserved, caged, measured and considered. Andthat is often the language of corporate. You have to bemeasured. People very often don't have full authorityto speak their mind. They're speaking on behalf of a company or anorganisation, that they don't have an authority tointerpret that view. They have to give the view,therefore they step back. Whereas I andyourself have the escalated privilege. If you want to speakmy mind and interact with my audiences and the people I'm communicatingwith and represent myself how I wish. And I'veoften found that by rolling up my sleeves andalmost like sitting cross legged amongst the group and saying,look, I don't have the perfect answer. This is how I think, this is howI view, let me brain dump as it's coming out my head and let'stalk about how that works for you. And that's a very much more approachable becauseeveryone goes, great, we can all put our hackles down, we can take ourpretence out and we have a proper conversation now and resolve this.That's hard to do when you've got a corporate voice or a corporatebehind you. You can't have that conversation. No. And what I
Ben Afiaguest
find helps here is an approach to change calledappreciative inquiry, that I've sort of delved into deeply in thelast sort of ten years or so. So when I first started working on languageat boots, I realised that I was actually working on change. Butat the time I didn't really have the tools in order to encourage change.I got from writing into tone of voice, intotraining in written and spoken languagethroughout organisations. But I really wanted to find a way ofsupporting that change, because when you're training, you are creating change inthe organisation. So I trained in appreciative inquiry and this wasquite an awakening thing for me. Appreciative inquiry startsby hearing the stories of times people are at their bestin organisations and we can use it in interviews,in workshops, in all sorts of different ways to get people expressingtimes that they've been at their best at work. And when people tell
Ben Afiaguest
these stories, they re experience some of the endorphins that they felt at the time.When you've got a room, let's say, sometimes I'll have 30 people or 60 people,sometimes 90 people in a room, and we get people pairing upand telling these stories of times they've been at their best, and then coming togetheras groups on roundtables of six or eight people andgiving the summaries of these stories. You get this volumeincrease in a room and you get this energy, this outpouring ofenergy. So what's going on here? So we're telling these stories, we'rereexperiencing, experiencing some of the endorphins. We're putting ourselvesin a more emotionally available and emotionally positivestate of mind, which then enables us to be really creativeabout imagining what the future could look like and beingcreative about finding solutions. So often in organisationswe're actually inadvertently triggering flight and flight we spend all. It's humannature. When we're walking down the street, we're scanning for snakesand dog poo, sabre tooth tigers. That's
Ben Afiaguest
how we evolved on the savannahs. So it's humannature to scan the horizon for danger. And that'swhy news is negative. You get the one nicestory at the end of the news, but all news is negative because good newsdoesn't alert us, it doesn't trigger us, it doesn't get us engaged emotionallyand the same is going on in organisations. So we areconstantly diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions tothem. And this can set up this kind of negativity spiral inorganisations, a downward spiral where people areconstantly in flight or fight orfreeze, and that's how people spend much of their working lives. So with appreciativeinquiry, we can turn this on its head, we can turn this around and startexploring times we've been at our best. That encourages people into a morepositive, you know, more positive emotional state, a positivefeeling state, connecting with their colleagues, connecting with their peopleacross the organisation. I get people the maximum mix of people, so I get people,senior and junior, from all parts of theorganisation. The general idea is to get the whole system in the room, ideally, andI have had that at times. I worked with the British Lung foundation some yearsin ago and I had 90 people, 90 employees, the wholeorganisation in the room for one workshop, which was incredibly empowering andvery exciting. You get people meeting and telling these storiesto people that they've never met before. And the reallysurprising thing, or maybe it isn't surprising, is that people find that theyvalue the same things. So telling those stories, thethings that they valued from those experiences are very, very common.I don't think I've ever had anybody tell a story whereI did it all on my own. It was all about my own personalgenius and capability and drive and ambition. I didthis all on my own. The stories are always about moments of connection,where teams have had each other's back, where people support eachother internally, and in turn they deliver for customers becausethey have the support of the organisation, support of their colleagues andempathy for the customer. So we have very, verycommon values. And that then gives you a starting pointfor behaving in a different way within an organisation. I've
Joanne Lockwoodhost
actually been on one of your workshops where you did appreciative inquiries,so I can actually say that I've experienced what you're saying there.And I remember the thing I struggled with at thebeginning was trying to find something I thought wasrelevant enough and meaningful enough that had apositive emotion enough that I wanted to share with somebody else. I had to reallykind of dig deep. And that was the hardest bit of the exercise, is tryingto find that moment that was worthy. People do struggle
Ben Afiaguest
with it and so they struggle to find a story that's goodenough, because. When were you last asked?Everybody listening now, just think, when did somebody last askyou? Tell me about a time that you've been at your best, when you've beenmost alive, most engaged, most excited, most involved.Tell that story and tell it in the first person. So I didthis and I spoke to John and he spoke toBetty, and she got the team together. Sonarrating the story in the first. We never do this.Nobody ever asked us this. So it's different.
Ben Afiaguest
And I think that difference is very powerful, but it also gets usto a place that is very emotionally resonant for us. It getsus wellbeing a story and recognising somethingabout ourselves and we just come out honestly, you just come out of it feelingbloody good and feeling good about the people around you.So in this negativity spiral that I talked about andin most organisations, constant firefighting, allorganisations leaders, their people areunder massive stress and it's only getting worse.We're firefighting, we've got inclusion,we've got recession, we've come throughCovid, we're struggling with hybrid working. How do we get that mix right? Howmuch are we in the office? How much are we working at home? Howdo I as a leader, relate to my team when they're home working and Ican't see them crying, but I know that they are becausethey're so stressed, how do we relate and then pickup and support those people? We're under more pressurethan we've probably ever been under. So thisnegativity spiral is almost endemic. It's one of the kind
Joanne Lockwoodhost
of rules of networking and relationship building is when you're trying toengage someone, ask them about themselves, because people like totalk about themselves, they like to be listened to and they like to lead theconversation mostly. So I suppose what you're trying to say here is, rather thanthe traditional thing, what happens is, how are things going? Oh, yeah, my leg hurtsor cat got run over yesterday. We dive into this negativestuff. We start really trying to dig deep down into whatI'm proud of, what's made me happy this week. I tell you about asuccess thing or talk about something my child's done thatamazed me or something, and bring those, as you say, the happy endorphins asopposed to the weather's bad, car wouldn't start, had to scrape the ice off thismorning, which is. We tend to get stuck into that, don't we? We do. And
Ben Afiaguest
one of the pivotal things for me has been actually about tenyears ago I trained as a coach. I did the Institute of Leadership and Management,level seven coaching training. My reason for going intoit actually was I've always had a remote team, so I've been in businesscoming up for 20 years. I have had a team of freelancers around mefor all of that time and for about around five years I was trying toscale and I had a team of five andin the long run it made me poorer and it made me unhappy. I didn'tlike employing people. I think my thinkingstyle is a bit too sketchy for that consistent leadership.But I had an office manager who was working with me and shewas a massive extrovert and she really thrived in an office and shewas struggling working from home. And I thought one answer to that might beto train as a coach. So I took on this courseand I have to say it was completely transformative. Unfortunately, that persondidn't last with me. She went back to working in an office in the centreof Nottingham and she's thrived ever since. So that was the right move for her.However, the coaching training actually shifted my perspectiveand I do some coaching, but more than anything it's made me a betterconsultant because it's helped me to understand how to ask betterquestions. So rather than the sort of skin deep, small talkquestions that you've just talked about, it's helped me to seehow I can ask questions that encourage people to open upand to go deeper, but to feel safe going deeper. Soit's about, I suppose, creating a sense ofpsychological safety where somebody feels like they can open upand that the question suggests that it's not loaded, it'snot political, I'm not judging, I genuinely want to hear what'sgoing on for you. I want to hear who you are as a person andI want to hear your story, because when I hear your story as an individual,that's enriching for me. And when I'm trying to finda pattern in those stories for a whole organisations, I want to hear lots ofthose. I want to hear many of those stories from across the organisation. And Ican only do that if I create a space, the safe space for peopleto do that, for people to open up. And a coaching stylehelps that. And that then comes into the kind of the changeprogrammes that I'm encouraging in organisations, I am trying toencourage them to develop a coaching culture, which is quite difficult.And what do I mean by that? It's coaching fromleadership down. So exec teams being goodcoaches, managers being effective coaches. Ifyour leadership and your management are all effectivecoaches, you actually don't need so much in the way of training. And that savesyou money because you are developing people individuallyall the time by asking those coaching questions. Andthe coaching questions really are helping people to understand their ownthinking and develop their own thinking. And that matters because when wedevelop our own thinking, we are more likely tobehave differently as a result of that change thinking. Whereas if we have atraditional leadership style where we tell people what to do. People resistit because humans don't like being told what to do, but they love beingencouraged to think. We love being encouraged to think.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
Yeah, I think I've been on a similar journey to you, where I've employedpeople. Then I had my own business, which was an ITcompany, 25 30 staff and lots of customers and things. AndI downsized to be a solopreneur. Then for some reason I got it be inmy bonnet that I wanted to be bigger. So I hired a few people andI found that I had a lack of satisfaction.Firstly, the balance sheet went down, my cash in bankwent down, and I wasn't getting satisfaction bythe managing the people relationship. I think I learned from that, thatwhat I actually need in my life, virtual assistants orpas or people that it can enact mythinking rather than me managing thinkers.So I want people to assist me to deliver what I wantto do, not manage other people to deliver something else. And that's whatreally brought it home to me. That's the relationship I need with people. I've done
Ben Afiaguest
a very similar thing and I have worked with people freelance in arange of different roles. Pretty much everything that I do, I haveother consultants who can back me up and they may becopywriters. So I mentioned my clientDMV, and I have a team of writers and designers and a projectmanager who are helping me with that and we are producing. So it's kind ofcreative agency production work. But whatI'm also doing in that work is I'm encouraging change within the organisation becauseI'm helping them to develop their working style asteams and their process internally, helping them to develop briefs, helping themto get clear on scope terms of reference forprojects. So I'm doing some sort of internal coaching andconsulting in that sense. And then when I'm working onbrand strategy, I have brand strategy thinkers who cansupport me in that way on spoken tone of voice. I have specialists that helpme with that. When I'm working on culture and behaviour, I have people whospecialise in values and behaviour frameworks, for example, people withreally strong hr or people backgrounds. So I work ina very similar way. And yeah,I had a point some years ago where I was getting Sunday night dread again,I was dreading the Monday meetings and I was like, I don't know, ten yearsinto my business, I was like, why is that happening? I'm running my ownshow here. It needs to work. Thefirst rule of business I think is it's got to satisfy the business owner. It'sgot to fulfil what the business owner needs, because the businessowner needs to be out there selling. And if we're not energised andfull of life and vigour, we're not selling and we'renot drawing in the business. So we have to be feeding ourselves first beforewe can feed other people. Not just in terms of cash, but also emotionally
Joanne Lockwoodhost
and satisfying our desires as well and ourmotivations. Absolutely. Yeah. Youmentioned storytelling, listening to each other, and itdraws me back to a previous podcast episode that I recorded with somebody whothe title was listening, not fixing. We have a habit or adanger that what we do is we listen to respond, we listento fix, we listen to trying to add value. And sometimeslistening to acknowledge is a valuable skill as well.And I guess if you're a great coach, it's part of that coaching kind ofmodel where you're just asking questions. But not everybody wants to befixed. There's dangers. We dive in there and want to go. I know theanswer to that. Yeah, and I'm a bugger for that,
Ben Afiaguest
actually. I do seem to have this kind of innerdrive to fix things or to solve problems, andit's taken a few decades to develop theskill. One of the books that I read a few years ago, which was seminalhere, was time to think. Nancy Klein and I haven't been on hertraining, actually, I have wanted to, and I know that some of our friends inthe professional speaking association have been on her training. And it's very much about creatingspace for people to think, and people appreciate that somuch and it's such a gift. Butso often when we're talking, we are thinking about what we're going to saynext, aren't we? We're thinking about what's my nextstep in the conversation rather than genuinely listening. And Ido think you can make more of an impact on the world, honestly,if you are able to be quiet and to absorb andto nudge and encourage rather thanbe looking for, what am I going to say next? And I think the samegoes with customers in business. When we're looking aftercustomers in customer service or as marketers or salespeople,how can we be listening more than selling, more than talking?Because everybody hates to be sold to, but everybody loves to buy.And if we think about it that way, then we should be listening more thanwe're talking. I actually love a good salesperson. I
Joanne Lockwoodhost
actually love a really great pitch or a really great hook or somethingwhere I can stand back, clap my hands and appreciate, go,that was top notch, well done. You are a Mastercraftsalesperson. And I said that to someone once and they went, well,I'm not a salesperson. I said, trust me, you are. You may not think youare, you may not label yourself as, but you've done a fantastic jobthere. Put me at ease. You had all the facts, you explained theproduct, and I had to applaud their technical skill onselling. And sometimes you find people who are either natural or have thatability to do that. And I think credit where credit is due. And I thinkthis person found it a bit patronising. I was trying to put him down bysaying, oh, you were very salesy there, but I genuinely meant it. Ienjoyed the experience, his professionalism. Running thispodcast show is a challenge because I'm listening to what you're saying.I'm also thinking ahead of what I'm going to ask you next, how thisconversation is flowing. But I've also have this little subroutine in my head that'slistening out in case you say something that I need toacknowledge and have empathy for or reinforce.I've really found that hosting this podcast has been a real challenge inlistening and just developing those communication skills that I wouldn'tnecessarily have if I was just having a chat in a coffee shop. Yeah,
Ben Afiaguest
no, it is an art and I think coaching skillsactually really help and good selling skills. AndI'm with you. I do admire a great salesperson, and for me, a greatsalesperson is a good listener. They hear whatyou want or how you talk about your problem orthe thing that you're trying to solve and listen to that beforejumping in with a solution. And so often people do just jump instraight with a solution. And it's quite binary, quite one sided. Soit's quite a rare skill, I find. I'm just thinking about somebodyrecently, I think I was talking about something around the house that I needed doingand I spoke to this chap and I kind ofpresented a problem and he just launched into a sales pitch about his businessand I was like, okay, I can see that you can do the job, butI don't want to do business with you. You've just talked to me, talked atme for three or 4 minutes. You haven't really asked any followup questions. You haven't really understood my problem or what I'm needing,what my priorities are. So he didn't get the business. And we see that
Joanne Lockwoodhost
in superficial sort of bulk marketing on LinkedIn where people areconnecting and pitching, they're shoving their calendar linkin your throat without even understanding who you areand doing a fact find. So yeah, I agree with you completely. It'sabout that humour, sensitivity, sliding inbuilding a relationship, having a conversation, seeing where people areat, listening to that problem solving. And
Ben Afiaguest
I suppose this is what I mean, just going back tothe opening to the podcast, talking about humanising business. I think this is what Imean by being more human. It is connecting ashuman beings, whether it's one to one in customer service,or whether it's create writing marketing or broadcast marketing,or whether it's talking to our staff in a larger organisation. How dowe relate and set up that relationship as human beings and think aboutpeople as individuals and respect them and acknowledge them as individuals?Because quite frankly, I think that just makes the world a better place.Acknowledging somebody as an individual is such a gift, but is sorare and in a way so simple. Ittakes a bit, a degree of humblenessI suppose, to acknowledge somebody and appreciate somebodyas an individual. And we can win friendswithin our business and we can win customers who will work with usfor stay with us for years just by acknowledging them asindividuals. And it almost shouldn't be so hard. But I do think for
Ben Afiaguest
organisations, quite often there's a lot of people perceive theydon't want to get into trouble. That's the main thing I find they don't wantto say the wrong thing and so they stick to what they've been told theyshould say. But often that guidance is not adequate, it's notenough and it's not enabling enough and it doesn't enable them to bethemselves. Just give you a nice example. SoI was working with Vodafone's webchat teams in India about five orsix years ago. I worked within with Vodafone on and off for about 15 years.And so I was over in India and part of the job, they had 1000people just working on webchat just for UK customersand the poor Indians struggling to understand us.The weirdness of us Brits and the problem fornon Brits is that quite often we complain in a very underhandsort of way, in a very passive aggressive way, we might say, oh, that's abit disappointing. I thought that would be cheaper or whatever, but wesay it in a very gentle way when really we'refurious. We don't reveal our emotions very well. Andso for people who didn't grow up in Britain, it's quite hard for themto interpret and understand that actually we're making a complaint.And so the project was about empathy skill. How do we help theseteams to have empathy for UK customers so that they acknowledgewhat customers need and give them that thing? And therewas quite a big awake. So I did some work on cultural awareness andI used some of Erin. So Erin Mayer is aprofessor at Insead, I think, specialist inculture. She's an American based in Paris and she talksabout eight dimensions of cultural difference. And the one that helped theIndians, interestingly, was the way that Brits engageand build trust and when we're on.So Britain is quite an individualistic cultureand that expresses itself in business, in if you fix myproblem, then I trust you, then we have a relationship. But I don't needchat beforehand in order to have the relationship. I need to know, be confident thatyou're going to fix my problem. India is a we culture, a much morecommunal culture. The relationship comes first.So it might be more natural to ask questions about how's your day been sofar? But to a Brit on webchat, we don't want to be asked howour day's been so far. We want to know that you're going to solve ourproblem quickly. So where does the relationshipcome? And when they realise that when a Brit is on webchat, because they're thereto solve a problem. Otherwise we would have picked up the phone. We don't wanta relationship, we want the problem solved. It was almost like the scales falling fromtheir eyes and they immediately changed their behaviour and suddenly they knew how to doit. Don't do the chitchat. Don't ask how the day's been. Give thereassurance that I'm going to sort your problem out in as few words as possible.So suddenly there's increased empathy and recognition ofcustomers as individuals and that's really empowering. That is
Joanne Lockwoodhost
so insightful. I can relate to that conceptentirely. That's how I want to do web chat. It'sshort, superficial, short sentences, one word.I don't want to keep typing stuff. I'm using one hand on my phonedoing something else. I just want my problem solved. Yeah, I cancompletely relate, Ben, thank you. This has beena fabulous opportunity to get to know you better and have a conversation.How can our listeners track you down?How do they get hold of you? Tell us a bit more about your bookas well. Well, the
Ben Afiaguest
probably first place is my website, which isbenafia.com. So benafia.comand that'swhere I've got loads of content. I've got videos, I've got articles, but also I'vegot my book. So the book the human business how to love your customers sothey love you back. I am expecting to publish in March,and that really lays out all of the thinking that I talked about.So we talked a little bit about culture and how we workinternally. So employee experience, we talked a little bitabout brand strategy. So to my thinking,you need to build your brand on top of the strengths of your culture, notjust on customer insight, which is how it's often done. And thatthen gives you the customer experience. So that's the third element that I talk aboutin the book. So employee experience, brandstrategy and customer experience, and I talk about how you can relate thoseall together in a practical way. I've got a chapter on each segment of mymodel that's on the website, and I've got a series ofpodcasts that kind of bring the book to life and they're onSpotify and everywhere you get your podcasts. AndI'm a fairly frequent inhabitor of LinkedIn, so I dolike to chat on LinkedIn. If you just search my name, Ben Afia, I shouldcome straight up. You find out more about me there. Engage. Connect with meon LinkedIn. Say hello, say you heard me on thepodcast and I'll be glad to connect and tell me what you found interesting aboutit and I'll be glad to continue the conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you,
Joanne Lockwoodhost
Ben. And a huge thanks to you, the listener, for tuning in forlistening to the end. I really appreciate that. If you're not already subscribed, pleasedo subscribe. Click follow. Click like why not give this episodefive stars in the comments below, I have a number of otherexciting guests lined up over the next few weeks and months that I'm sure you'dbe equally excited by on this Inclusion BitesPodcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. And of course, if you'd like to be a guest yourself, pleaselet me know. Drop me a line with any feedback or suggestions tojo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.ukand finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It has beenan absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you nexttime. Bye.
In this episode of The Inclusion Bites Podcast, Joanne Lockwood engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Ben Afia, a specialist in making business more human through language and communication. Ben shares his expertise in coaching and encouraging internal change within organisations to promote a more positive emotional state and connection. Joanne offers her insights on downsizing her business and realising the need for virtual assistants to fulfil her desires and motivations.
Ben Afia, a language and communication specialist, is dedicated to making business more human, focusing on customer service, marketing, and communication within organisations. With his expertise, he encourages listeners to visit his website, benafia.com, and invites engagement and connection on LinkedIn. Ben emphasises the importance of humanising business, considering diverse audiences and cultural differences, and delivering on promises with a warm, friendly tone in business communication.
Throughout the episode, Ben and Joanne delve into the power of storytelling, developing a consistent brand voice, and the challenges of translating spoken language into written communication while maintaining an authentic tone. They underscore the significance of empathising with the audience and delivering messages in a relatable, human way to foster genuine connections.
A key takeaway from this episode is the importance of humanising workplaces through authentic communication, empathy, and cultural awareness. Listeners will gain valuable insights into coaching, brand strategy, and customer experience, as well as practical guidance on creating meaningful connections and understanding diverse perspectives within organisations. Whether in leadership, marketing, or customer relations, this episode provides essential knowledge and strategies for humanising workplaces and fostering genuine, inclusive environments. Subscribe to the podcast and engage with Joanne for ongoing discussions on making the workplace better for everyone.
The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Inclusion Bites, SEE Change Happen Ltd or Joanne Lockwood. This episode is shared for general interest and discussion; we accept no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any statements made.
