Neil Bedwell is a founding partner of LOCAL, a Change Marketing agency located in Atlanta, Georgia that creates people-first communication programs for some of the world's best companies, such as Coca-Cola, Google, and Procter & Gamble. Prior to launching LOCAL, Neil first led digital strategy and content for Coca-Cola's Global Content Excellence group. Today, with 20 years of experience working inside some of the world's best companies, Neil shares his advocacy for an employee-first approach to corporate change to multiple start-ups, HR, Marketing, and Transformation events as a regular keynote speaker and General Assembly Instructor.
In this episode, Neil humbly but proudly shares LOCAL’s unique Change Marketing approach to people and transformation leaders looking to navigate culture successfully. In particular, he shares how important it is to invest in people genuinely and empower them to work on what they love to do, not just what they can do because he believes that this is the best way they could serve the company. More than this, Neil imparts to us in this episode the vision of what a company would look like with single-minded and inspired employer-employee relationships.
This Cast Covers:
- How Neil thought that ‘The Great Resignation’ must be ‘The Great Realization’ and the actual reasons why people work (03:37)
- What most employers fail to do for their employees and how they can improve on it (06:52)
- How today’s human resources might have been affected by the Industrial Revolution ‘factory-type system’ on people (12:25)
- Trust and value as the two most important ways to create an exciting culture amongst your employees (25:40)
- How recognition of employees became an undervalued thing nowadays (26:20)
- The original definition of the word ‘company’ and how it must be lived out (28:30)
- Listening to consumers’ and employees’ needs and adopting a people-first environment as two of the best cultures Neil has started seeing in companies (31:30)
- What must be taken into account when pitching an idea to your team as an employer (40:54)
- Why it is important to make your employees the first audience of every marketing plan and not just leave them out of the process (45:55)