For 5 years now, Brockhurst Consulting has been aspiring to make a positive human impact in the world of work.
Our services focus on supporting organisations and individuals to develop and grow through change, to achieve results and most importantly, to ensure everyone enjoys what they do. Microsoft has just published some statistics on the intentions of workers worldwide; over 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer and/or changing jobs this year. I’m sure you will agree we have all been living through so much change in the past 18 months; in fact sometimes I think we even need to change the word ‘change’!
From all accounts, there is a lot more change to come…
This has been reinforced in recent conversations we have had with our clients who tell us that some of their teams have been experiencing up to 70% turnover! It is also evidenced by the number of requests for our career transition services we have received in the last few weeks. There is a ‘turnover tsunami’ clearly happening!
What this means is that you can pretty much guarantee that:
someone you work with, and/or
someone you work for, and/or
someone who works for you, and/or
you will change roles and/or organisations over the next few months.
Our DNA is founded on decades of working with people transitioning their careers, together with our extensive experience of supporting organisations, teams and individuals through transformation programs. We can equip you to lead your people through ongoing change, we can help you find and secure your next job when you’re competing with 40% of the workforce, and we can support you and your teams in remaining agile and resilient in the face of constant uncertainty.
We can help you change the way you change.
As a facilitator of team strengthening programs, Sarah Wood, Director of Consulting Services, reinforces the importance of every team having a clear and shared purpose.
At Brockhurst Consulting we believe it’s critical that every team member understands why the team they are a part of does what it does, and how everyone’s individual contributions connect with this.
In fact, we have recently re-visited our vision and mission with our own team of consultants and coaches at Brockhurst Consulting, and we have all re-committed to our purpose as being:
“We are helping to build a world in which people feel safe and supported at work, so that they are inspired and fulfilled by the work they do.”
Each of our team members feels deeply connected to this collective purpose as we aim to make a positive human impact for the individuals, teams and organisations we work with. Our purpose also acts as our north star guiding us in everything we do.
We take teams through an activity that involves all team members in helping them clarify and articulate their ‘why’ – what is their deeper mission in terms of the impact they are seeking to make:
Why do you do what you do?
What would your team’s purpose be?
What contribution and/or impact are you seeking to make?
There’s never been a more appropriate time to have this conversation with your team to strengthen the connections of team members and to remind them of the value and the impact of the work they do.
We can guide you and your team through this process.
As a passionate student of Neuroscience, Tom Brockhurst provides a tip to help us through these ongoing tough times – learn to be kind to yourself.
Neuroscience tells us that we experience physical pain in the same way we experience emotional pain. We can therefore take some insights from what we do when we have a physical ‘bump’ to what we can do to look after ourselves during the many emotional ‘bumps’ that Covid is currently throwing at us all.
When we experience a physical injury on the sports field, what do we do?
We take some time out of the game
We head to the bench
We get some treatment
We watch the game from the sidelines
We keep in touch
We head back into the game when we are ready
So what can we do for ourselves when we experience pain from the various emotional impacts of Covid? Tom believes it is really important to do whatever it takes to get yourself onto that metaphorical bench, give yourself that break, re-gather your senses and get back into the ‘game’ only when you are ready:
Put your hand up
Take some time out
Step away from your computer
Grab a cup of tea
Go for a walk
Call a friend
Get back to work when you are ready
We can help you generate that new habit of being kind to yourself so give us a call today.
Having spent 14 days in isolation, Tom Brockhurst has a new perspective on the implications lockdown can have on people.
After having his autonomy taken away for a couple of weeks – ‘it really erodes at your being’ – it makes sense to Tom that the future workspace is some form of a ‘blended environment’.
Neuroscience tells us that we need to solve for autonomy and manage for fairness and this extends to organisations contemplating bringing workforces back into the office.
So what does solving for autonomy mean?
It means we need to question what is the best way for an organisation to move forward, and how do we ensure it is collaborative and inclusive to all. What are the decisions that we can extend to our employees about coming back to the workplace?
How do we ensure decisions are made as a team and not in isolation, or without consideration and input from all?
Does 100% of our workforce need to be in all the time? Maybe it’s only 50%. We give them the choice about who’s in and when.
Does everybody need to get together every day for that communal piece that we know is quite valuable?
Do only a few hours a week or a few days a month need to be spent in the office?
Neuroscience research has proven that if everyone has a say in decisions at work, you will create a more productive and connected workplace.
So once these decisions that gives our employees some autonomy have been made, we need to ensure everybody is having a say and there is fairness in the way that it is working.
Solve for autonomy and manage for fairness. That’s how we’re approaching the quagmire and the ambiguity of coming back to work after COVID. Hopefully there’s no more lockdowns but whatever happens, the future is going to be different.
We hope this has been helpful as you are thinking about transitioning back to the workplace over the next few weeks and months.
Reinventing myself as a Virtual Facilitator
by Sarah Wood
With workshop facilitation making up a significant chunk of my work, I thought I was in for a quietish year back in March – my calendar was suddenly cleared, trips to some of my clients based in regional Victoria were cancelled and my facilitator’s box of tricks was stored away…
But my quiet time did not last long in the end as one of my clients, realising that we were in for the long haul with COVID-19, requested that I proceed with the series of workshops that had been planned for their staff – but transferring these to the online environment.
I must admit the first few were tough – especially for me with little confidence and comfort with all-things-technology. I had to extensively rehearse – I kept creating Zoom meetings for myself, persuaded family members to help me test out break out rooms, created virtual backgrounds and practised sharing screens and annotating whiteboards. I sweated over being able to check the chat box, admit late participants as well as share my screen and talk to my slides simultaneously, all the time reminding myself that I had a growth mindset! The positive feedback, however, together with the engagement of participants (as much as you can sense engagement from faces on a screen!) helped grow my confidence and increasingly try out more and more online tricks and activities.
I then persuaded another client to give it a go – what was once a 4 hour ‘in the room’ workshop, I re-designed to 2 x 2-hour sessions with a break overnight for some homework. I transferred the templates I usually hung on the wall on large sheets of butchers’ paper into online documents which could be downloaded, completed and shared with participants during the sessions. After some tweaking from the initial pilot, my sponsors acknowledged we were achieving the desired outcomes – and in a more efficient way – as the completed online documents were dropped straight into the organisation’s system saving any write up of the butchers’ paper content.
This has opened up more opportunities than I would have had previously, the CEO admitting “given the prohibitive travel costs, I was always hesitant to ask you to run these workshops before, but having witnessed the success of the Zoom version, there are no boundaries and I want your workshop approach and planning methodologies used throughout the entire business!” Over the past 2 months I have ran workshops from my ‘home office’ in Melbourne for their branches in New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, NSW and SA – and another benefit – no jet lag!
This past week I have facilitated 8 online workshops which has been pretty exhausting, but I’m loving the connections with teams and the positive online vibes I feel from working in a collaborative ‘zoom’. Participants love the opportunity to discuss work issues in the break-out rooms (out of earshot of the pesky facilitator!) and seem to appreciate being involved in continuing to contribute to their organisation’s plans and business challenges.
What would be some of my tips?
Use the flipped classroom approach wherever possible – distribute pre-reading or produce online modules for participants to watch and absorb content beforehand. I use Vidversity to create interactive videos as pre-work for participants. This then enables the majority of the online sessions to be interactive when participants reinforce their learning through activities, quizzes or discussion (learn – do – share)
If possible, create a relationship with the participants before the workshop – give them a quick call or send out a brief survey
Keep sessions to a maximum of 2 hours with a short stretch break half-way through
Use the break-out rooms for small group discussions as much as possible – participants seem much more willing to contribute in the small group setting than in the plenary sessions
Integrate a polling platform such as Mentimeter to change up the visuals – even better with some music!
Use ‘Stampocracy’ for any consultative decisions (participants use the annotation tools to vote on the options)
Log in on your ‘phone as a participant so you can keep an eye on what participants are seeing without having to keep asking “can you see that?”
Would I rather be back in a room with my clients?
Absolutely! Being an extravert, I get my fulfilment from having people around me, but for now I am happy to continue with the next-best option – online facilitation. Moreover, post pandemic I will have a hybrid of engaging facilitation offerings to suit existing and potential clients wherever they are based. This has to be a good outcome all round!
If you would like an interactive engaging online workshop or other forum for your teams, contact us now…
