to help you achieve yours
People:Case study
Our brief: Harness the potential of our people
When we arrived with this client, we found a culture of stagnation, broken promises and cynicism. There were plenty of good people, some bad people, but no structure to improve it. How do you change that?
For years the employees of the business had been kept on the periphery resulting in high recruitment costs, in high staff turnover rates and poor skills and knowledge transference.
Where we started: Undoing the damage
Like many businesses, false promises had been made and communication hadn’t been as good as it could have been. We therefore found ourselves with a workforce that had heard it all before and were expecting change to fail.
What we did: Put the people in the process
So what did we do that the business hadn’t been able to manage? We operated openly and told it like it is. Most staff found this approach refreshing, and it’s usual that some wince at the idea until it’s proven to work, so we weren’t disheartened when that happened here! It takes time to rebuild trust, but by being frank about past failures and demonstrating that the management were willing to listen, we started to get the positive people on board, and when they were on board, we got them involved.
How we succeeded: We created open, consistent channels of communication
We needed consistent communication on multiple levels.
We created “feeder groups” to generate ideas and act as a two way conduit that involved over 20% of the workforce instead of the two staff representatives that had proved to be ineffective. By doing this we were able to communicate through the firm and eliminate the negative “grapevine” in a way that had never been done before. We got the right people on board the change process and alienated the doubters.
We delivered direct presentations to the staff during the process, building credibility in the new management structure and demonstrated that things were in fact changing. From continually asking for feedback through several systems we implemented we were able to continually assess the progress being made, the attitude of the people and address issues at source as opposed to letting them fester.
Employee satisfaction is at its highest, management who had been unable to work together for years are committed in the development and are actively helping each other and the volume of ideas and people based initiatives are at the highest level in the business’ history.