Management consultants don’t come cheap. Fair’s fair, they bring with them fresh eyes and a heap of experience from out there in the Big Wide World. And because they aren’t bogged down with the day-to-day mundanities of meetings, deadlines and endless fire-fighting, they have the time and headspace to devote singularly to the task of analysing your business with a view to optimising its performance. That, in essence, is what you’re paying for when you hire a management consultant.
But not every business is fortunate enough to have bottomless coffers. And even for those who can afford hefty consultancy fees, in actual fact, nothing they unearth or reveal isn’t already there for you to discover yourself – if only you had the time to step off the hamster wheel of business life for long enough to do some digging around. All the essential ingredients are right there in front of you – the knowledge and experience of your employees, historical business performance data, customer feedback, and more besides. But, in order for any recipe to be useful, it needs more than a list of ingredients (resources). It needs a method (strategy) to go alongside it, and a cook, or team of cooks, who understand what they need to do with both in order to achieve something even vaguely close to the desired outcome. Aligning all of these in perfect synergy is, of course, easier said than done, and that’s without throwing in the added spice that the working environment and company culture bring.
That’s where The WinningFormula comes in. Just like any management consultant, we can help you to analyse every aspect of your business; from how your company strategy is understood (or not) by employees, to the resources and processes that help (or hinder) them in delivering on objectives, and the pervading culture and its impact on engagement levels and morale. And, unlike your average management consultant, the price tag won’t make your CFO wince. Not only, that, we can achieve the same analysis very unobtrusively; we don’t need to ‘move in’ or take up much needed meeting room space, and we don’t believe that analysing your business has to mean ‘on the job’ scrutiny of your employees. None of that is necessary; at best it is mildly irritating for those trying to get their day-to-day job done, and at worst it creates unnecessary anxiety and paranoia among your workforce. Either way, we believe there is a far more cost effective, far less disruptive, and far more insightful way to find out what’s really going on in your business and how you can better align your people, your culture and your strategy to create competitive advantage. Better still, our approach involves and values the input of the most important people in your business; your employees. Thereby ensuring that you engage them in the process, rather than alienate them.
The WinningFormula is quick, hassle free and easy to use – we require no more than a couple of hours of your time to make it work. Way more than just an engagement questionnaire, The WinningFormula is comprised of a detailed online assessment, designed to create a holistic analysis of your business, delving into the three critical components that define and influence your organisational culture (leadership, engagement and team environment) and the three crucial constructs that shape your business strategically (structure, process and strategy). We’ve combined our knowledge and expertise in organisational psychology and assessment, with the rigour and security of our technology (acquired from our many years of collective experience in companies such as SHL) to develop assessments which are tailored to your business, valid, reliable and highly predictive. We’re efficient, too. Whether you require us to gather feedback from everyone in the business, or target specific groups, we can launch the project within a matter of days. All we need from you is the contact details for your chosen participating employee group, and then you can leave the tedious business of data collection to us (we’re very good at it, as our completion rates will demonstrate). Within a few days of closing the data collection process, you’ll be reviewing insight reports that tell you everything you need to know. And what’s in those reports? Gold dust, in the form of data and feedback as reported by the people who know your business best – your employees – giving you clarity on what you need to start, stop and continue doing to make your business reach its full potential, to harness the engagement and loyalty of your employees, and to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction with the right resources, determination and enthusiasm.
Of course, the value is not just in the data itself, but in the solutions. It’s one thing to know what frustrates your people, or what makes it hard for them to give of their best in their role. But its quite another to come up with solutions that are meaningful both to you as a business leader (in other words, feasible, realistic and affordable) and to your employees on the receiving end (in other words, fixing what matters most, in the right way). One doesn’t need a Masters in Psychology to work out that when people feel like they have been part of generating the solution, that solution is more likely to work and more likely to resonate. That’s why, compared to any ‘imposed’ change as recommended by management consultants (who, by this stage in the game, have sashayed off to their next client), the solutions recommended in our reports add real value. They’ve come from within the business, and they’re prioritised too – meaning that you’ll be able to take the right action, very quickly, in the right order. Insight to action, at lightning speed. And, while most management consultants tend to make their recommendations and then scarper like rats out of a trap, we won’t do that to our clients. You can rely on our consultancy expertise from end to end as we work with you to help interpret the report analysis and feedback and convert it into meaningful business improvement.
We believe in transparency, so rather than hide prices, insist you make an official enquiry or get stuck with a long conversation that may not be appropriate, we have a simple cost indicator, which is all based on the number of employees you wish to survey. Of course, every business is unique, and so for a more detailed discussion about how The WinningFormula might be tailored to your business, contact us and we will be happy to discuss this.
Further information on The WinningFormula is available on our website, including an example report.