Success story two
Real People: Creating employment policies from the ground up
Our client was a very busy, successful company in the creative industry that was beginning to grow. The company had begun life as a partnership and neither partner had any experience of employing staff. Suddenly they had ten.
The company contacted Real after a word of mouth recommendation.
We found that they had no contracts of employment or any policies or procedures for dealing with staffing issues. They had no idea what they should be paying or what terms and conditions would be both affordable and competitive.
As anyone in the creative industry – particularly new media – knows, the market is fiercely competitive. Any successful company needs to be able to attract the very best people.
At the same time, the company needed to know how to motivate and keep staff, as well as bringing out the best in them.
We’ve found that the key to working with small, busy companies is to work out a realistic way of providing consultancy support. Using one-to-one coaching, we created a programme that enabled our client to:
- Identify and sell their brand as an employer
- Set realistic pay rates and terms
- Employ staff under clear contracts that protect their interests
- Identify what are the core competencies for high performance
- Attract, select and recruit the right staff
- Lead and motivate staff to give 100%
Manage staff performance, attendance and behavior.
To our client’s surprise, the whole process took only four and a half days. Three half days of consultancy were spent establishing what they really needed and creating processes and documentation to meet these needs, within the culture they wanted to build.
The other three days were spent in highly concentrated training, staggered to fit in with their busy work schedule and covering what they really did need to know about employment practice.
At the same time, our client had telephone and email support when they needed it. We offered advice on how to deal with a member of staff who was destructively critical of everyone and everything at work. Our client wanted to generate responses to advertised vacancies from a more diverse range of applicants and we helped them with this.
The client said:
‘We both agreed it’s the most memorable training we’ve been on – it’s compact, professional, and the trainer really knew what they were talking about.
‘It’s been like having an HR department that we don’t need full-time but can ring at any time and get advice. Very good value.
‘For our size of organisation it’s just tremendous. It’s releasing us to do our job. And we now feel like proper employers rather than a partnership that was suddenly spiraling out of control.’