Case Studies

The Opportunity
The small, yet mighty team at Alexandra Kidd Design pride themselves as being a very client-driven Design firm, known in the market to create customised design solutions with an emphasis on style, simplicity, detail and quality. The team partnered with us during a growth phase with a huge expansion of the team required. After some disappointing experiences of losing new recruits after just a few months of being onboarded and certain new starters taking longer than expected to get ‘up to speed’, the management team couldn’t understand why they were having so much trouble retaining and integrating their employees. They had a very good recruitment and induction process and great line managers within the business.

What is the tool/approach we used?
Along with other projects RPE conducted with the team, we proposed implementing RPE’s own Accelerate Onboarding to their induction process. Now before the new employee starts in the business, they completed a simple 10-minute survey-based tool that gave managers straightforward, practical insights on how to tailor their onboarding approach for new employees.

The Outcome
These insights provided line managers with a targeted understanding on how to best train and support new hires to understand all the detailed processes, systems and ways of working at AKD. The insights also gave managers the best communication, networking and goal-setting methods for that individual.

The simple recommendations provided were easy to implement making new starters feel super welcome, and ready to make value-adding contributions sooner.

Organisational Diagnostics with Contract Resources

What was the opportunity?

After being purchased by a Private Equity firm, Contract Resources changed hands in leadership and the new CEO was keen to understand the ‘unwritten’ strengths, risks and areas of improvement – those not seen in financial and operational due diligence that was uncovered by the Private Equity’s investment team. The new CEO was keen to understand the cultural sentiment, employee change-readiness levels and leadership impact along with any other insights that could inform his turnaround plan he was developing.

What is the tool/approach we used?

RPE designed a tailor-made organisational diagnostic for Contract Resources.

To ensure we developed a design that would produce insights aligned to the need, we spent some time upfront deep-diving into the business’ new strategy and current turnaround plan to really understand the areas of assessment we needed to focus in on.

To ensure high engagement and response rates, we worked with the company’s HR team to promote the survey through internal communication channels and offered incentives for participation. We also made sure that the survey was available in different mediums and multiple languages to accommodate the diverse workforce.

How did we resolve and leave an impact?

The data and insights generated from the diagnostic allowed us to create easy-to-understand reports and actionable advice directly aligned to businesses turnaround strategy, providing them;

– With insights on areas of the business with low and high levels of change
readiness

– Highlighted specific individual leaders in the business that had potential
to ‘make’ or ‘break’ change delivery

– A discovery of the unique elements of the business culture and ways of
working that should be harnessed

– Insights on how to best communicate and connect with various types of
stakeholders within the business

– Prioritisation on the ripe ‘low hanging fruit’ for maximum impact

– Shed light on barriers and risk to change initiatives

Overall, the RPE process of diagnostic design for Contract resources was laser focused on delivering meaningful and actionable insights that informed what was driving the need for feedback – to inform the planning and execution of the turnaround plan, to improve engagement of employees for change, prioritise initiatives to improve both employee engagement and business efficiencies.

“Marcella, Carmelina, and the Real People Equity team have been a crucial part of helping ScienceAlert.com transition through a recent period of rapid growth, which saw the team double in size in just a matter of months. Like all small businesses moving into the next stage of development, we were experiencing growing pains and struggling to get the original start-up team on the same page. Marcella took the time to really understand our business needs and core values and help us make important decisions about where to focus our energy and how best to move forward. When it came to having the difficult but necessary discussions Marcella and RPE were involved in every step of the way to make sure everything occurred as seamlessly and painlessly as possible. Marcella was always readily accessible during the tough moments and despite only spending short periods of time with her, she has a really firm handle on all the team members, their personalities and needs, and the growing needs of the business. More than once she and Carmelina have identified upcoming pressure points before we do.

We couldn’t have made it through our recent business development without RPE and barely recognise the happy, efficient, and engaged team we have today. We continue to rely on Real People Equity to help us keep in touch with team sentiment levels, as well as negotiate our staff management and development. We’re now looking to expand further and have already started the road-mapping process with RPE”