New Introduced in Brain-Fueled Workplace by Chaela Volpe
A neuroscience-based solution for individual, team, and business performance optimization — the foundation of Strategy Enablement, a transformative new core business function dedicated to engaging employees in their work.
Did You Know?
Low engagement costs the global economy $8.9 Trillion annually — and burnout and transformation failure compound the damage.
What’s behind this? Despite Gallup defining engagement as enthusiasm for both the work and the workplace, most companies fixate on the workplace — overlooking the vital responsibility of helping employees engage with their work, through effective communication. This is why since 2016 only ~20% of employees are engaged at work — crushing productivity and profitability as burnout soars!
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2024
60% say their job is the top threat to their mental health, and 69% feel their manager impacts their well-being as much as a spouse. Burnout levels are nearly identical for employees and managers (~50%), while 25% of leaders feel burned out often or always, and 67% feel it at least some of the time …a recipe for failure.
Mercer Global Talent Trends 2024 · UKG 2023 · Microsoft 2022
Despite astronomical investment in external change management solutions (15–30% of project budgets) this failure rate spiked 18% since 2019, reflecting an unsustainable trend: wasted resources, escalating expenses, missed opportunities, and sapped morale, energy, and confidence fueling disengagement and burnout!
Bain & Company, April 2024Poor Communication is to Blame
Engaging employees in their work is essential. Yet focus is overwhelmingly on the workplace — brand, company, leadership — lacking strategy for the work itself. Why? Until now:
I Have a Solution
I am a Corporate Communication expert with twenty years of experience working across industries with major multinationals. Immersion in business-critical initiatives around the world has brought this problem into focus and deepened my commitment to solving it.
In Brain-Fueled Workplace: Harnessing Neuroscience for Performance, Innovation, Transformation, and Growth, I reveal the consequences of brain-undermining communication and present a solution to empower the workforce — ensuring success includes both exceptional business outcomes and employee well-being.
Strategy Enablement is a transformative new core business function dedicated to engaging employees in their work through The Performance Optimization Planning Model (The POP Model™), my globally proven framework that unifies knowledge, planning, and execution. A Strategy Enablement Lead uses this neuroscience-based model to design continuous, integrated communication programming that optimizes individual, team, and business performance. Companies can hire for this role or empower an existing cross-functional leader to facilitate The POP Model. Read Brain-Fueled Workplace for the full solution. Start here to learn why The POP Model is revolutionary, then discover my services to fuel your workplace with thriving minds — instead of overtaxed, underperforming ones.
Meet Chaela Volpe →The Framework
Once you learn the power of The POP Model, let’s talk. In the age of artificial intelligence, we must get serious about how we apply our own human intelligence. My model can help you take control of business-critical initiatives to move faster, smarter, and more humanely. The best part? You’ll build in-house capabilities that eliminate costly dependence on external teams and consultants — whose efforts cannot deliver the right results.
New strategies launch with internal marketing fanfare to raise awareness of change. But these broadcasts don’t include actionable guidance or meaningful relevance for individual roles.
Silence follows, leaving folks uncertain about what to do, when, and how. Then, a flood of messages from leaders, managers, project teams, HR, and others triggers a frenzy of “urgent” activity, triggering the Doom Loop.
In contrast, The POP Model ensures role clarity at the outset of new initiatives and throughout their duration, improving performance and powering progress.
Often an afterthought, project communication is disconnected from strategic planning — leading to chaotic or ineffective rollouts and a lack of cohesion across the business agenda. The POP Model resolves this by integrating communication planning into project planning.
The Strategy Enablement Lead partners with the project team — or the strategic vision owner — to plan across four dimensions with leaders, managers, and subject experts.
The POP 4 wheel — select a dimension to explore it. View the original diagram.
By agreeing what’s being communicated, to whom, and when, all stakeholders are equipped to effectively play their role before, during, and after project changes are introduced into operations.
The top-down management style is outdated. As the workforce increasingly seeks coaching, The POP Model infuses it into operations, starting with strategic planning. Instead of dictating, a Strategy Enablement Lead uses coaching to help individuals expand their thinking and co-create plans. They ask leaders, managers, and subject experts strategic questions about The POP 4 to form communications.
This method offers a dual advantage: In developing a roadmap for their teams to engage in the work ahead, these groups can mentally process upcoming changes and plan for transitions. This inclusive approach fosters ownership, alignment, accountability, strong leadership, and high performance.
Strategic Communication, employee engagement, and change management are often misunderstood and operate in silos. The POP Model reframes and unifies them into one powerful approach: engagement focuses on work, communication drives daily operations, and change becomes an ongoing process.
Through this central lens, the Strategy Enablement Lead reviews plans for The POP 4 in the context of your business, people, and work to recommend communication activities that drive progress. The agreed-upon direction is captured in a Communication Programming Roadmap (CPR) — a tool far more comprehensive than a typical comms plan.
CPRs breathe new life into projects!
The POP Model aligns communication with how the brain processes new information in two key ways:
1. Using the type of communication the brain craves: Clear, consistent, specific, timely, actionable, relevant, and inclusive.
2. Communicating continuously to:
The POP Model includes 8 value metrics, defined below. They can be used independently to assess how communication programming impacts outcomes or examined in relation to other business metrics. At the end of every project the Strategy Enablement Lead should review the impact of their work in these areas:
Transparency: Measure of clarity people have about their work, requirements to achieve goals, and the roles of interdependent counterparts
Collaboration: Teams’ capacity for knowledge sharing, problem-solving, decision-making, efficiency, productivity, innovation, and success
Productivity: Measure of what people can achieve in the context of operating conditions, including how much they get done, the quality of their work, and its impact
Engagement: Extent to which people can immerse themselves in their work, fulfill their responsibilities, and add value in the context of daily operating conditions
(The 8 POP Value Metrics) — continued:
Capacity for innovating the business’ offerings, practices, processes, and thinking behind them
Ability to maximize output while reducing unnecessary human and financial costs to achieve the best possible results
Decrease in a range of interconnected human and financial risks, influenced by the experiences, behaviors, and outcomes shaped by daily operating conditions
Level of success in transforming a business or delivering transformative initiatives in relation to the quality of other POP value metrics
The Client Journey
The ideal client journey follows three phases. Organizations can engage across the full journey or begin with the offering most relevant to their needs.
An Executive Alignment Session clarifies organizational priorities, challenges, and goals to determine where support will have the greatest impact. A Trapped Value Audit identifies the behavioral, cognitive, and operational barriers limiting performance across The 8 POP Value Metrics and recommends targeted action.
The Strategy Enablement Capability Build Masterclass equips leaders, managers, and project teams with a shared system for alignment, planning, and execution. Participants learn how to work both as and with a Strategy Enablement Lead and use The POP Model™ to develop integrated strategies that bring complex initiatives to life.
Embedded Advisory and Retainer Support applies Strategy Enablement to active initiatives and embeds The POP Model™ into daily workflows. Support may include project consultation, implementation guidance, infrastructure design, governance, integrated planning rhythms, and internal capability building to sustain performance improvement over time.
Business Benefits
Change becomes easier — because it works with the brain, not against it. Improvement is immediately measurable in The POP Model’s 8 value metrics and beyond:
Deeper relationships fuel engagement, accountability, and commitment.
Clarity replaces chaos, unlocking productivity, collaboration, and high-impact outcomes.
Decisions, teamwork, and execution accelerate.
Teams cut errors, rework, and waste as change becomes efficient and sustainable.
Teams drive their own missions — avoiding high costs and risks when external support fails to deliver.
Stronger leadership aligns teams, removes roadblocks, and fuels peak performance.
The Book
Harnessing Neuroscience for Performance, Innovation, Transformation, and Growth
Global change leader and corporate communication visionary Chaela Volpe offers a solution: Strategy Enablement — a vital new business function powered by a revolutionary, neuroscience-based planning model to optimize individual, team, and business performance.
If you want to save time, increase profits, and help your workforce thrive, this book is a must-read.
Endorsements
Leaders across risk, technology, coaching, crisis management, and communications on Chaela Volpe’s work.
“Chaela is a visionary coach and advisor whose practical, results-driven approach has the power to transform workplace culture and operations. Brain-Fueled Workplace is a must-read for those responsible for low-risk strategy delivery, and leaders who genuinely care about their people.”
Chaela has woven together significant life and workplace experiences, honed in a range of companies around the world, with leading-edge insights from experts in disciplines including neuroscience, social psychology, business strategy, management, operations, and communication, among many others. The result is a compelling and actionable exploration of what it takes to meaningfully improve the workplace and enhance the workforce experience — providing a practical solution that redefines the role of communication in driving performance excellence.
An innovative, highly strategic application of coaching to help businesses break counterproductive behavior cycles to uplift the workforce shaping the future.
Finally, an effective solution for engaging employees in their work to navigate complex transitions and drive change. Chaela presents a commonsense approach to rally teams to action and align them for high performance — one that is comprehensive, consistent, measurable, and cost effective.
Brain-Fueled Workplace delivers performance optimization capabilities to businesses of any size and in any industry. Chaela’s vital new planning model brings connectivity, structure, and impeccable organization to our work, transforming how we operate and the results we can achieve.
Brilliant! A compelling review of what the human brain experiences on the front lines of the modern workplace, and practical steps to optimize individual, team, and business performance. By transforming employees into active agents of change — rather than recipients who struggle to keep pace — we can maximize their contributions and, in turn, what businesses can achieve.
Exactly the kind of thought leadership we need right now! Brain-Fueled Workplace is the culmination of strategies Chaela has tested worldwide. Her proven approach helps leaders guide diverse, global teams through uncharted waters, dismantles siloes, deepens engagement, and transforms communication, collaboration, and operations.
Consulting & Advisory
Through my independent consultancy, IntegraComm, I help organizations build the missing infrastructure for innovation, transformation, and growth. Through Strategy Enablement powered by The POP Model™, I align leaders, managers, and teams across strategy, knowledge, planning, and execution.
A transformative new core business function dedicated to engaging employees in their work through The POP Model™ — designing continuous, integrated communication programming that optimizes individual, team, and business performance.
From Executive Alignment Sessions and Trapped Value Audits to the Strategy Enablement Capability Build Masterclass — equipping leaders, managers, and project teams with a shared system for alignment, planning, and execution.
Embedded Advisory and Retainer Support applies Strategy Enablement to active initiatives and embeds The POP Model™ into daily workflows — project consultation, implementation guidance, infrastructure design, and governance.
Resource Library
Explore sample instruments from Brain-Fueled Workplace — request a free download of the Performance Impact Review questionnaire or the Trapped Value Audit Guide.
Assess how communication programming and daily operating conditions impact performance across The 8 POP Value Metrics.
Identify the behavioral, cognitive, and operational barriers limiting performance — and the targeted action that releases trapped value.
Let’s Talk
Once you learn the power of The POP Model, let’s talk. Take control of business-critical initiatives and build in-house capabilities that eliminate costly dependence on external teams and consultants.
