Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Jackson & Jackson, Wiley, $29.95.
A practical guide to getting the best from the humans you work with, How to Speak Human takes a realistic approach to dealing with the communication challenges faced by today’s workplaces.
Speaking human should come naturally, but it doesn’t. ‘Somewhere along the way, amidst the busyness, the business, the technology and the professionalism, it became harder to connect with the people around us.’
The founders of employee experience company Jaxzyn – Dougal and Jennifer Jackson – are “fascinated with what makes people tick”. They are the first to admit that perhaps they’re a “little starry-eyed, but we’d rather be part of a world that believes that better is possible”.
Their big vision is an “unshakable belief that organisations can have it all. They can be profitable. They can be good for society and the environment. And they can be wonderful places to work, where people go to work happy and return home happier, better for having gone to work that day”.
The focus areas – attention, influence and engagement – come from the most common conversations we have every day.
They consider themselves mighty fortunate to work with a diverse team of thinkers, communicators, creaters and doers, discovering and implementing ways to make our workplaces more human.
This book takes an unashamedly sensible approach. It’s a how-to that hurtles headlong and enthusiastically, into the fascination of science and theories of human communication. It draws on over a decade of work with savvy leaders from organisations around the world, penned with the hope that their experience might help others make a difference.
Jackson & Jackson have worked with like-minded folk from organisations such as PepsiCo, Mattell, Amazon, Nestle, Origin Energy, Novartis, Probuild and Blue Care. We have to trust the difference-makers and visionaries, trendsetters and forward-thinkers, influencers and leaders … people who have faith in ‘possibility’.
Believe in human.
