white papers

Active Management v. Autonomy

Autonomy has been proven to be a key driver in employee engagement, retention and productivity. Management plays a critical role in facilitating a sense of autonomy amongst the workforce. Active management is known to create sustainable high performance through visibility of performance and controls, however there is a common misconception that this style implies a lack of trust and infringes on employees’ freedom. However, when implemented well, these controls can be used to promote independence and a sense of autonomy, driving both performance and engagement.

This white paper discusses how active management can be effectively implemented in order to create a strong sense of autonomy and ownership amongst employees, while maintaining a controlled environment of high performance.

How can a coaching culture transform your business?

With senior leaders accustomed to the power of coaching, you might ask, why isn’t this rolled down throughout entire organisations? Coaching conversations provide a base for individuals to grow and create sustainable solutions for your business. Coaching has proven its benefits for a variety of roles and industries, yet companies still veer away from instilling coaching cultures in the workplace. This white paper explores the benefits of coaching in the workplace, how to have a successful coaching conversation and how to engrain it into your business, starting from today.

Bringing fulfillment to the workplace

How, when there is a growing opinion, spurred on by social media, for individuals not to love their work and avoid going over and above, do companies attract, motivate and retain individuals who are willing to go the extra mile?
With falling engagement scores, rising attrition and time in job plummeting, it has never been more important to build a fulfilled team. This white paper explores the reasons for an unfulfilled workforce and how, as businesses, we can rebuild it and return purpose to individuals.

Learning from Technology Interface Design

We all know technology companies invest heavily in designing products that work, but we rarely look at how we can make use of this investment in our own industries and apply the lessons in how we deliver our services. One of the key focuses of technology is the user interface and ensuring the user gets what they need, when they need it and as easily as possible. This principle should also apply to all our business interfaces, giving us the smoothest, most efficient processes. This paper provides an insight into how we can take these lessons and apply them in the business world.

Customer Service – is it really the priority?

It is hard to find an organisation that doesn’t claim to put customer service high on its priority list but do they really deliver true customer service? This paper provides an insight into how and why they might not be delivering what customers really want.

What does good scheduling look like and how can it drive performance improvement?

This paper will explore the extent to which effective scheduling, and ‘planning for success’, can impact performance improvement and operational success, as well as identifying some of the key principles and functions that should underpin an organisation’s scheduling function.

Are Leaders Born or Made?: A Leadership Toolkit

Leadership plays a significant role in determining a company’s success or failure, yet scientific research on the topic is relatively new and did not begin until the twentieth century. To this day, definitions of the term ‘leadership’ are still being presented and how to best support these leaders being uncovered. New research has shown that HR’s confidence in the next generation of leaders has fallen to an all-time low. This white paper presents a leadership development toolkit to close the gap between how HR view leadership quality and how leaders view themselves.

Achieving Optimisation in Outsourced Contracts

As the demand for integrated services continues to significantly grow in the Facilities Management (FM) sector, this paper seeks to identify further opportunities for FM providers to enhance value for money for clients and challenge if more could/should be done to drive cost efficiencies through increasing self-delivery and truly optimising resource.

How is true collaboration achieved? – A 12 Step Guide

If large scale construction projects are a major part of our future and it is difficult to list those that are successfully delivered on time and to budget, what is the solution to ensuring that this improves? One critical consideration is how effectively teams are able to collaborate to achieve the project outcomes.

This white paper explores this concept in more detail; why is it so important, why is it difficult to achieve, what typically goes wrong and therefore what can be done to enhance it?

The Art of Motivation

Every organisation we have worked with has had the challenge of motivating employees to either improve output, improve quality, reduce costs or achieve a combination of all three. With differing degrees of success, managers have turned to different approaches to achieve this.

This paper provides an insight into why some are more successful than others and how managers need to approach these challenges.

The Remote Working Revolution – a hindrance or aid in the pursuit of productivity? 

This white paper explores remote working, its viability as a sustainable future option for many businesses, and provides an overview of the recent trends in its uptake.

Visual Management: instilling a performance-led ethos

This white paper explores visual management as an element of an effective Management Operating System and how it can be integrated to build a strong platform to support continuous improvement.

What not to forget when going digital in Financial Services

This white paper explores the age of digital within the Financial Services industry and how sustainable performance improvement is about more than chasing trends.

Providing a Service: A look into outsourced helpdesks

This white paper looks at the outsourced helpdesk environment and the challenges providers should be addressing to enable them to remain competitive in a margin sensitive environment.

Creating a climate for project success

This white paper takes a look at the evolution of project management and challenges what we mean by project ‘success’, as well as exploring some of the common pitfalls and challenges faced which cause projects to underperform.

The Productivity Challenge

This paper looks at why Productivity in the UK might not be rising as quickly as expected and some of the constraints on improving the headline numbers.

Building a more productive workforce

This white paper looks at how far technology can actually drive true productivity improvements of a field based workforce, and some of the common pitfalls that exist when spending money on new technology.

Working with Internal Teams

This white paper provides an insight into why internal teams are created and how they can be used to achieve real value.

Sustaining the benefits of a change initiative

This white paper provides a unique insight into why some change initiatives continue to yield benefits and others wither on the vine.

Motivation and Reward

This white paper explores how performance related incentive schemes may not be the best solution and actually a hinderance to achieving true productivity and customer satisfaction. The paper highlights in depth the potential drawbacks to PRP in conjunction with presenting an alternative perspective.

Performance improvement for field service operations

This white paper takes a look at how some service organisations achieve true productivity gains while others simply ‘automate’ existing operational wastage, and examines why performance improvement equates to more than increasing the number of calls-per-day-per-engineer.

Implementing performance improvement in call centres

This white paper explores what drives productivity in call centres and how workforce optimisation enables contact centres to enhance service delivery while boosting customer and staff satisfaction.