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Energise
What is it?
“I feel so tired at the end of the day”
“At the weekends? I just collapse!”
“The business just feels like it is down in the dumps”
Your business thrives when it is full of energy. People get more creative, they overcome obstacles and become more ambitious in their plans. People have more time for each other, are more understanding and get to a point where they work quickly and effectively with each other … all the time! People work harder, faster, stronger, longer.
And so do you.
Our approach to “culture” and “employee engagement” is all about energy. The way people feel and what they believe about their job changes what they will do and how they will do it.
Of course we all want to work in an organisation that feels like a great place to turn up every day, and as a manager you want that for your teams and yourself. But at Chemistry we have proven that business performance is directly related to how people feel at work, fact.
Having the right energy in your business will create value and deliver results. So at Chemistry we help businesses to re-find the spark they used to have when they were a start up!
How does it work ?
We use a combination of energising activities. We start with the top team, coaching them to think about how they interact and energise the rest of the business. If the top team are not committed and engaged … don’t bother trying to energise the rest of the business, colleagues will know when managers are just going through the motions.
Then we work directly with the rest of the business, sometimes explicitly talking about people’s energy, sometimes we are just making changes that we know create more energy – like replacing bad stories with good stories, recognising achievements, even changing expense policies!
We bring pace, creativity, challenge and of course ENERGY to re-energising your business.
Case Studies
The Problem
Airwave designed, built and operates the largest public safety radio communications network in the world, delivering critical voice and data communications to organisations that provide vital public services. This includes the police, fire and ambulance services in Great Britain as well as local authorities, utilities and transport providers
Airwave is privately owned by Macquarie investment bank, having been spun out of O2 and BT before that. They have an impressive track record of great service and an exciting future as they grow globally.
Over the previous three years Airwave has had to respond to changes in the UK economic outlook. The planned public spending cuts affected their customer base and were expected to have a significant impact on Airwave’s future new business. To address this, the business had to make adjustments which resulted in a reduced headcount.
Its workforce was under increasing pressure to do more with less and yet was enormously proud of the services provided, so despite reduced numbers, the same service levels had to be maintained.
How We Helped
Chemistry launched an Energise programme to “re-energise” the Airwave business. The programme had lots of components, organised into two main strands. First, the Executive Committee (ExCom) focused hard on their own behaviours. We helped them build their own Behavioural Charter, making commitments to each other about how they would work with each other, even down to how often they would speak with each other every week, as a minimum. They gave each other virtual green cards for spotting great behaviours and reds for … well, you know when.
Then in the second workstream we worked with them on energising the rest of the business. Demonstrating the right behaviours was part of this, but we also put in place some more structural process changes. For example we introduced breakfast briefings where every executive committed to running a breakfast meeting every two weeks with 15 colleagues from across the business to connect with them, facilitate group discussions and communicate key messages. This showed the execs were human after all, in fact they were smart and likable and after running these sessions for nine months they built massive confidence across the business.
The Result One year on and there have been some amazing achievements. A recent 360 survey, carried out at all levels across all functions, reported that ExCom had significantly improved the organisation’s energy level and made significant changes to how they were behaving with each other and with colleagues across the company. The behavioural and belief shifts across the business were amazing.
In that same year Airwave not only made dramatic improvements in the energy of their people and behaviours of their managers, they smashed their key financial targets of EBITDA and cash. Both profitability and customer satisfaction targets improved by more than 7% on last year. As Airwave Chief Executive Richard Bobbett put it, “this was no co-incidence!”
