As you’re aware, UK employee engagement sits at 10% and 33rd of 38 European countries on Gallup’s index, costing the economy £257bn a year. HBR’s August 2025 analysis found 72% of culture initiatives produced no improvement. Conventional engagement programs aren’t working. It’s that most ask nothing of employees and produce passive results. Leaders need to be more innovative and creative to address this.
Fernando Gaspar Barros, a former Microsoft leader who has spent 17 years running an unusual experiment with HR teams at firms including BMW and BNP Paribas: putting cross-departmental employees in real bands, and rehearsing for months. He took a chance, and it succeeded in strengthening employee engagement.
Rita Cavadas at BNP Paribas, who has run the program with her teams, puts the outcome this way: “Compared to more traditional formats, this type of shared experience had a stronger emotional impact and proved to be a powerful driver of engagement and collective motivation. It helped strengthen informal connections, which later translated into more open communication and collaboration at work.”
Fernando wants to author a piece arguing that rock bands offer insights into the needed conditions that most engagement initiatives miss.
- Cross-departmental stakes, not team-building. Bands force collaboration between strangers from different functions, with a public performance date in the diary. Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams and found psychological safety predicted performance more than individual talent, but safety only develops when people have a real reason to take interpersonal risks together. Most engagement programmes give them no such reason. A booked gig does.
- Sustained commitment, not events. HBR’s August 2025 analysis found 72% of culture initiatives produced no improvement, arguing change comes from systems rather than events. Bands rehearse for months. That sustained, structured commitment is closer to a system than to a team-building day, which is why the outcomes look different. Away-days don’t work; sustained shared work does.
- Voluntary exposure, not mandatory training. You don’t build confidence by practising more. You build it by walking on stage underprepared, surviving it, and discovering the audience was with you. Edmondson’s psychological safety research describes the same mechanism in workplace language. Workshops can’t simulate that. Only voluntary exposure with real witnesses can.
It would be exclusive and non-promotional. Fernando wrote on a related angle for Entrepreneur Europe; this would be a UK-specific HR piece with fresh framing.
Happy to send a draft on spec, or develop the outline with you first.
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