HELPING PEOPLE TO THRIVE across industries & LEVELS

We proposed our flagship 8-week How To Thrive programme, which transforms wellbeing, engagement and performance. Through deepening self-connection and emotional intelligence, the programme helps people to create simple habits that will transform their approach to work, enabling them to better manage their personal resources and build stronger relationships founded on trust and authenticity.

We decided to focus our approach on working with the leadership and management populations, as they have the greatest impact on the overall culture. We encouraged them to cascade learning down to their teams each week, giving them the opportunity to immediately put new insights into practice.

Our bite-size approach fitted in well with their business needs and enabled us to invite participants on a weekly journey of self-discovery and application.

To kick things off and provide sufficient data to support our approach, we created a survey that we sent to all programme attendees.

Using both quantitative and qualitative data, the survey measured people’s current levels of happiness at work, their anxiety, the strength of their relationships, and their sense of connection to the company’s mission and purpose.

This gave us valuable insights into how the team saw themselves and each other, and created a baseline from which to measure the impact of our work.

We first brought senior leaders together to help them to build trust as a leadership team and enable them to align behind their new vision. We explored the cultural norms that would support that vision and what might get in the way, and agreed how the leaders would support the success of the programme.

We then used the output from this session to create a series of communications to the wider team that introduced the programme and how it would support their development, helping them to engage with it from the start.

20+ years of working in the field has taught us the key skills people need to be happy and successful in the modern working environment. At the heart of our approach is the concept of mindfulness, a thread that weaves through each of the modules, which include stress management, overcoming barriers to effective working, ways to give effective feedback and deal with conflict, and how to be more assertive and set boundaries.

We recognise everyone’s experience is different so as well as sharing examples of best practice, we use Design Thinking to create space for participants to discuss what their challenges are and come up with solutions that would work best in their specific context.

Within each of these bite-size sessions, participants could experiment with new skills or ideas, put them into practice over the following week and then report back on the impact in the next session. The short, pragmatic sessions helped learning come to life and the little-and-often approach enabled us to overcome the challenges created when training is delivered over one or two days, when people often become overloaded with information that they then struggle to implement.

The keystone to any effective training is how much learning people retain and use, and we recognise that this can be difficult; the pull to old habits is hard, especially when people are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources.

We applied a number of approaches to help new habits become business-as-usual:

Thrive buddies - we partnered people up randomly and encouraged buddies to have a weekly check in outside of the training to discuss how this week’s habits are going and explore ways to support each other to deepen the activation of learning.

Weekly challenges to encourage attendees to put learning into practice.

Teach on - by asking leaders to share their learnings with their teams we help to consolidate learning and create greater levels of accountability.

Drumbeat of comms - to underline key learnings and nudge people into action.

Reflection/accountability check ins at the start of each subsequent session.

Video resources and articles to further support learning.

In spite of delivering the How to Thrive programme at one of the client’s busiest times, we were heartened by people’s engagement with the programme and the feedback we received each week.

94% of attendees thought the programme was extremely relevant to their needs. They loved the open structure and the space for their personal experiences to be recognized

The team talked of a shared language that has emerged across the organisation, with a greater sense of control and personal accountability.

Here are some of the comments the programme received:

“This is the first time we have felt like a team”

“Teams are communicating with much more empathy and respect”

“It was supportive, insightful and challenging”

“The team [ ] feel really close knit and I feel so much happier now I have put routines in place to support my wellbeing.”

“Love the focus on humanising everyone first & celebrating the good”

“feels like we can really make change together.”

“Really great to change the mind perspective from a negative to a positive”

“10/10 - So good to talk about things to help us set better boundaries”

“Felt it was really open, collaborative and encouraging.”

“We loved Thriving People’s approach - their short sessions fitted in well with our business needs, and the regular drumbeat each week kept people motivated and engaged.

Simon and Andy were really invested in our success from the start, creating a sense of trust and possibility while helping us to see fresh perspectives and try out new approaches.

I was particularly impressed with how much the team opened up to each other during the programme, which created a new level of trust and connection.

The team loved how interactive and personalised the sessions were, and how easy it was to implement key habits from each session.

They speak of feeling more empowered and of having a shared language which made it easier for them to connect with and support each other.

I’m so impressed with how much better the team are communicating and how much more bonded everyone feels. It was exactly the cultural boost we needed, at exactly the right time. “

– Mark Pavlika, HR Director