In this post, we’ll talk about how to kick this process off.

Step One: Create a Team

It’s important that the top team in an organisation is championing the Secret Sauce project, but the organisation may find it useful to create a specific team to drive the Secret Sauce work forward. Consider representatives from Marketing, HR, Organisational Development and Internal Comms, if you have these functions.

Step Two: Focus Groups

The purpose of these focus groups is quite specific - to understand what it is that your best and brightest love about your organisation and see as your unique identity. From this information, you can understand how to attract more of these sorts of people to your organisation, while keeping your best people and everyone else engaged and retained. Therefore, when selecting your focus group participants, you will be selecting those people you’d like to clone. This is not a generalized engagement exercise, where all team member opinions, or a representation of the average would be sought.

The key to a successful Secret Sauce focus group is to keep it simple. Two main questions are enough – 1. What do you love about this place, and 2. What don’t you love about this place? The value comes from the discussions that develop from these questions.