Culture and Engagement
Culture and Engagement
We help organisations grow a culture where people are engaged and deliver exceptional results. Creating bespoke solutions that reflect your ambitions and context. With decades of experience, we help people realise that culture is simply ‘the way we do things around here’ – so they have the power to achieve rapid change. We don’t have off the shelf products that we try to fit our clients into. Instead, our starting point is to recognise that every organisation is unique and develop a partnership that will make the biggest difference.
All organisations are different, with their own unique strengths and areas for development. Common challenges that organisations come to us to address include a desire for:
- Increased collaboration (breaking down silos)
- Ownership and pro-activity (stepping up to take action without waiting to be told what to do)
- A willingness and appetite for change (challenging the belief that ‘it has to be done this way because it always has’)
- Innovation and agility
- Dealing with day to day conflicts so they are actually addressed (rather than ignore them for fear of making things worse – in the vain hope they will go away)
- Diversity and inclusion (recognising the untapped resource and performance improvements to be gained through a culture where everybody is able to deliver their full value)
Inevitably, engagement and the way people talk, think and behave have a profound impact on an organisation’s performance. Ways of working that may have delivered good results in the past need to evolve to match changes in technology, a global market and rising customer expectations.
We work in partnership, engaging people across your organisation to reflect on the culture needed for success. Helping them understand the role that each of us plays to perpetuate or change culture can transform business results.
Why us?
Our starting point is to understand what makes your culture unique and valuable. What must NOT change? People have often had bad experiences of ‘culture change programmes’ because these programmes create the impression that ‘everything we do now is wrong’ – that is not true. Your success to date has been built on the current culture. We can be allergic to ‘culture change programmes’ because we feel like they are being ‘done to us’. Our approach has to engage people from across the organisation and empower them to be a part of the change needed.
We work with senior leaders to get them to paint a picture of the future. They need to make the case for change – what are their ambitions and what ways of working are needed to succeed? How do they tell this story in a way that is engaging and exciting, to create a ‘pull’ for their people?
Engaging a diverse group of people to act as catalysts for change or ambassadors for new ways of working is often highly effective. The change agents benefit through their personal development and take the lead by bringing their colleagues in the conversation.
If we want people to take the lead and bring a new culture to life we need to trust them with the challenge and empower them to make decisions on their day to day activities. This is not blindly abandoning responsibility but investing in relationships over time.
Part of the challenge is to ensure that senior leaders hearing how their people are feeling. We love to create dialogue between all levels of an organisation, helping CEOs to be approachable so their people tell them how it is, not what they think they want to hear.
We devise innovative and thought provoking communications strategies to generate engagement and create a buzz.
What our clients say:
Graeme worked with our leadership team over a couple of workshops to improve team culture and behaviours. The team found the experience highly engaging and the process has delivered an improved team dynamic and greater openness around values and communication style. I would highly recommend Graeme to others.
I have worked with People Business since its inception back in 2000 – despite the fact that I have had jobs in four different companies since that time. I have relied on them to turn my team’s performance around, develop, and motivate them. In each of my companies, the challenges and priorities were different and the people that needed development were incredibly varied. People Business delivered good results every time, and their work was stellar, relevant and fun.
Some of the services we offer
Culture assessment and employee surveys to give everyone the opportunity to reflect on their culture
Employee engagement workshops to build pro-activity and ownership
Team development for engagement and to role model culture change
Executive support and coaching – people follow their leaders’ actions (not their words) so we coach senior leaders to visibly role model change
Communication strategy to encourage a dialogue on change, promote collective ownership for culture and signpost evidence that change is happening
Conflict resolution – we all have bad hair days. How leaders respond to ‘non-compliance’ will determine if people believe that the change is real.
Developing management tool kits with improved recruitment, induction and performance management processes
Post M & A integration, to establish one culture – unifying IT systems will not in itself deliver the benefits in the business case
Organisational design, managing reorganisations, formal consultations and developing HR policies and processes that are aligned to the changes and help to embed new practices.
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