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Mission Critical Solutions
Productivity Improvement
Building a highly responsive, super-lean internal organisation that is clear on what deliverables are required, with what priority, and what anticipated outcome to drive massive productivity shifts. We will train you in facilitating objective and key results (OKR) methodology to tease out and unpack your strategic vision, and break it down into bite-sized units of work that align perfectly to parent objectives – from the top down, bottom-up and laterally throughout your company. Provide and implement the right digital tool to document, track and measure progress weekly against your ambitious targets. Examining with an experienced set of eyes those elements that help productivity vs. stripping out those that hinder it. It starts with defining it for your world, including vision, values, communication, leading, coaching and ways of working (remote, hybrid, agile, global), team and individual effectiveness.
Speed to Profitability
Most early-stage companies are pre-profit and struggling to get anywhere close to a profitable position. Driving to a near-term vision, with a clear set of targeted missions, with strong product/market fit, then the ability to penetrate those markets with skill and building network effects (ala Reid Hoffman’s The Alliance), to grow virally. Enabling Product, Sales and Marketing with the people, skills, tools and incentives they need to penetrate and establish a dominant position in new markets.
Measurable Performance
Knowing what the required levels of performance are, and how to measure those succinctly, honestly, transparently, and empirically – with accurate, near real-time data and a performance coach (line manager or best qualified, trusted manager in the organisation). Then making it actionable. We train your teams to identify and fix skills gaps, stretch comfort zones and remits, coach for improvement, celebrate progress and tenaciously address toxic work behaviours such as abject lack of interest, intent or initiative.
Workforce Planning
Workforce Planning that is proactive, flexible, responsive and prioritised- pulling together Finance, Exec, Sales/Marketing, Product, Operations and HR to co-create and current state, near term and longer term, costed and phased plan, agreed by all involved and reviewed and tracked weekly to ensure the prioritised activities are being delivered on time, on budget, on target. Additionally, scenario planning – based on criteria that will either drive growth or require retrenchment – and how best to manage that proactively and with skill, to reduce turbulence, friction and unpredictability.
Rebuilding and Repairing Trust
For those (mostly all) companies in their earlier stages who have chosen to cut heads to weather the economic storm, how do you go about rebuilding trust again? Psychological safety was replaced by survival politics and paranoia, and dissociative behaviours begin to flourish, whilst regretted attrition is likely to skyrocket once the economy picks up. But today, you’ve likely lost hearts and minds, discretionary effort, and innovative thinking – and have left most people in survival mode – operating in a fight or flight daily behavioural pattern. We’ll help develop a new, enthusiastic and reality-based reset strategy that is people-centric and involves open communication, transparent exchanges and an honest approach to building a company together. No more black-box thinking – it’s time to involve your employees in your collective journey and get everybody on track to navigate the uncertainties facing us all.
Set up a quick powerful 30-minute exploration call
Special Project a la Carte Offerings
In the event you have a working HR function but would like support to address mission-critical projects to jump-start your people strategy and set you up for success.
Discovery & Assessment
We undertake an extensive review of your existing people strategy, from the bottom up, to first understand your commercial vision and target operating model, then overlay talent requirements, phasing, and employee value proposition relative to the market.
We then examine every aspect of the employment journey – from the perspective of new and established team members – accurately discovering the strengths and weaknesses of the entire employee lifecycle. Finally, we compare your current state with your desired state and suggest gap remedies that will bridge your people strategy with your commercial strategy. Our report will set your entire HR scale-up agenda.
Typical Duration: 2-3 weeks
Indicative fee range: £1,000 - £2,500
Culture Creation & Integration
This is a mission-critical requirement for any scaling business, and we ensure a thorough, highly collaborative process to pull down your most vital, DNA-level core cultural values through an exhilarating design-centred approach.
We work with founders and their leadership teams to capture, curate and codify the most poignant and impactful values that are driving their commercial mission – and turn those into measurable performance guideposts, against which everyone will be assessed, paid and promoted. ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ – as Peter Drucker said – and it’s proven to be one of the most essential truths of our time. We will unpack, clarify, test and design your Magna Carta – and bring your cultural values into the everyday lives of your people…Meaningfully.
Typical Duration: 2 months
Indicative fee range: £2,500 - £3,500
Employer Brand Building & Launch
We assess your attraction and recruitment pipeline and qualitative metrics against industry measures, providing your attraction and recruitment health baseline.
We will then further provide you with a detailed plan to radically improve your market presence, your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and digital integrations to assure the highest possible candidate and hiring manager experience, improved sourcing and recruitment ratios, reduce cost and time whilst increasing value, quality and growth phasing requirements.
Typical Duration: 3-4 months
Indicative fee range: £1,500 - £2,500
Delivering Your Recruitment Engine
If fast-growth is required, we’ll implement a plan to increase volume of quality-sourced superstars, drive your brand and EVP messaging to methodically-mapped talent markets, ensure great candidates are engaged with well-trained hiring managers and interviewers using a compressed 3-4 week timeline from sourced to offered.
We will reduce fees substantially by providing exclusive, globally positioned mini-RPO vendors and bring impact up, improve ratios, push great experience through the roof, and meet your demanding phasing requirements. Importantly, we’ll make sure they are the right people, right fit to accelerate your growth and market aspirations. We have delivered 300% growth annually and built entire companies on a global scale in 12-18 months.
Typical Duration: 6-18 months – depending on requirements
Indicative fee range: Reduce per/hire recruitment fees capped at 10% - 15% of base salary (with monthly advance fee to cover sourcing costs. No additional administrative fees.
Creative Onboarding
Using the latest, coolest and most engaging digital tools, we’ll design and implement fully-automated pre-boarding and first 90 days onboarding experiences that will have your new hires buzzing about for years.
Negative attrition in the first 12 months of a new employee’s tenure is most often attributed to poor onboarding and not setting up the conditions for their success. We call this process ‘Speed to Full Productivity’ as we seek to reduce a new hire’s typical 3-6 month learning curve down to no more than 1 month. Increased retention, team impact, productivity boost and engagement scores are our success metrics. You provide the testimonials and ‘special sauce’ to a string of introductory and instructive videos – and we’ll map those to our digital experience, which is reusable, scalable and effective – all highly available anytime, both before and just after your new employees start. It’s a game-changer.
Typical Duration: 2 months
Indicative fee range starting at:
£2,000 - £3,000. Tool contract priced separately.
HR Digital Tooling
Understanding which tools will positively impact, automate, delegate and enhance your business’ ability to attract, recruit, onboard, train, educate, improve performance, listen, pay and benefit your employees is challenging.
Adding deep insight via people analytics to make data-driven action planning a science rather than an art is the value-added ROI. We will, based on a detailed requirements review, project manage identifying and implementing the best, most relevant, and reasonably priced HR technology appropriate for your company’s maturity now and into the next three years.
Typical Duration: 3 months
Indicative fee range: Accurate quotes post discovery call as it depends on the tool(s) you seek to onboard. Annual tool contract priced separately.
Creating the Performance/Development Infinity Loop
We replace the dreaded and often useless annual performance review with a comprehensive 360° real-time feedback engine where peers, direct reports and line managers can input regularly into their team member’s performance journal.
Their progress is tracked against quarterly goals, as determined by self-assessment and expert observation to address current and future role skills gaps. Personal and professional development goals are captured and understood – and development plans are put into place to guide your team members and their newly trained managers on a far more impactful, meaningful and powerful growth journey – increasing retention, empowering employees, exposing risk and remediating with transparent planning and learning – and ultimately creating a clear career path map for everyone involved.
Typical Duration: 2 months
Indicative fee range starting at:
£3,500 - £5,000. Annual tool contract priced separately.
Creating Open Career Paths
Using a terrific new online tool, we help you shape and career map your entire organisation, for every team, right down to each role within your company.
Regardless of how your organisation is structured, we can lead your team leaders through a design process that effectively breaks down each role, the required skills and capabilities, at what level (1-5), and then assign those to every employee in your company. Everyone can self-assess against these skills and create developmental pathways to their next promotion. Performance, training and coaching can then be targeted to specific goals and everyone will benefit from clearly visioning their futures.
Typical Duration: 1-3 months
Indicative fee range:
£2,500 - £3,500. Annual tool contract priced separately.
Compensation & Benefits Benchmarking
Payroll and labour costs can occupy up to 80% of a tech company’s balance sheet, and ensuring you have the most competitive and attractive total compensation packages to attract the best talent to your fledgling start-up or scale-up is essential.
We can provide you with a total compensation strategy and philosophy to guide all of your pay decisions. We can also advise on clever tooling with services that focus on SME companies in your industry, as well as the European and global marketplaces. Further, we can help set up your entire employee population, and then cast future hiring, to build a comprehensive workforce planning forecast to inform your decision making around hiring, pay levels, recruitment phasing and annual planning.
Typical Duration: 2 months
Indicative fee range:
£3,500 - £4,500. Annual tool contract priced separately.
Goal Setting & OKR Adoption
Being certain about your company’s annual and quarterly targets regarding development and delivery actions, product releases, sales & marketing efforts, and everything that supports those efforts is core to requirements.
Doing so with proven techniques like Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), made popular by John Doerr in his book, Measure What Matters will afford you an intelligent, transparent and inclusive way of developing aggressive targets that are highly aligned and synchronised across your entire organisation. Preferably these are captured in a tool that provides the ability to capture, communicate, share, track and measure the progress you are collectively making towards your most critical objectives – on a monthly or quarterly basis. We teach you and your teams the OKR methodology, identify and implement tools to support, run workshops across your company to capture key OKRs, and empower you and your teams to manage this process moving forward.
Typical Duration: 1 month
Indicative fee range:
£1,000 - £2,500. Annual tool contract priced separately.
Leadership and Managerial Excellence
Using the 5 Behaviours framework, derived for The Five Dysfunctions of a Team created by Patrick Lencioni, as well as his 4 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, I work with your leadership team to uncover your baseline team behaviours, assess individual self-awareness and psychometric factors, provide powerful discovery and individual coaching – in both group and 1:1 settings to awaken understanding of the challenge and of self.
We then workshop together what the strengths, vulnerabilities and opportunities are for enhanced development, team impact, and learning to build and maintain a cohesive leadership team, create organisational clarity, over-communicate that clarity, and reinforce organisational clarity through human systems. For managers, it’s about learning to become a superior coach – to steer, support, shape, nudge and shift their people, whilst building trust, constructive conflict, commitment, accountability and great results.
Typical Duration: 3 months
Indicative fee range: £5,000 - £8,000
Innovative Design for Improving People Systems and Experiences
Borrowing directly from product, software and user design methodologies, we provide game-changers in your organisation to learn and embrace rapid result design methodology – which engages real end-users in an expertly facilitated workshop to pick apart any aspect of their businesses, professional and personal experiences – and identify current-state flow, relative satisfaction with that state, and to identify and prioritise the most urgent areas for improvement.
Then undertake the fix, A/B test for results, and hold meaningful retrospectives to tweak for improvement or celebrate as ‘improved.’ Wash, rinse, repeat. We provide you the methods, some useful white boarding tools such as Miro, and facilitation technique training, which you can repurpose as your own to drive this new discipline throughout your organisation. We’ll be there to assist whilst you enjoy viral adoption of this incredibly effective approach to learning, collaborating, exploring and improving everything about your company.
Typical Duration: 1-2 months
Indicative fee range: £1,500 - £3,500 (depending on how many certifications you undertake.
Set up a quick powerful 30-minute exploration call