Fostering workforce congruence and cohesion
Business Psychology informed strategies to help employers meet your people goals
Fostering workforce congruence …
Taking a step back, how is the fit between your people goals and your current reality? Closing the gap may involve ensuring culture, structure, processes, values and employee behaviours are broadly in harmony. Without this alignment, an organisation can become inefficient, messy, confused. I help you ensure people can invest their effort, energies and time in good work.
… and cohesion
Cohesion comes with shared goals, values, and a sense of belonging. I help you build an environment where every team member feels valued, respected, and included regardless of their background, characteristics, or differences. Cohesion comes as people seek mutually beneficial solutions – where both employee and worker have a sense of gain.
Attract, engage and retain good people
Maintain workforce wellness and lower stress levels
Create good work and good managers
Build inclusion and belonging
Partner through change with your employees
“Kelly’s approach is very much one of partnership. She takes time to really understand the organisation from the outset, identifies relevant HR metrics, hosts a professional engagement survey and provides great clarity and insight around the results… in turn, this enables us to recognise and celebrate what is working well and take action on what is not… We consistently achieve response rates above 75% and over a ten year period have seen that the actions we have taken as a result of the findings have improved the performance of our organisation.”
Engagement and Communications Manager, Professional Services
“Thanks for helping us with evaluating our inclusion strategy. For me, the value of the Inclusion Barometer is all in the conversation that it generates within our team. The assessment confirmed what we already knew about our weaknesses, but the conversation that it elicited about where we could go to become even better was where the gold is. You’ve really been able to challenge us on what we could achieve when we put our heads together, thanks.
Senior manager, Technology sector
What you can expect from my consultancy services
Finding the right fit solution
The most common thing I see with clients is a misfit between their business and people strategies. This misfit emerges as you grow out of certain strategies, or an idea has been brought in that doesn’t fit the culture or the business. People issues emerge because of a gap in expectations. Fresh eyes on your organisation make these idiosyncrasies easier to spot.
Uncovering your brilliant quirks
People can be pretty forgiving of some mediocracy if you stand out on a few key things as an employer. I help you find what’s important for your people, and how these preferences might vary across talent groups. You can then prioritise your investments in the stuff that matters. I’ve helped average employers become great places to work.
Systems thinking
Systems thinking is core to understanding organisational behaviour – from the individual, team, through to the broader organisation and its ecosystem. My services are grounded in research, evidence experience, ensuring that they are reliable, effective and drive performance, innovation, and adaptability at the right levels.
About Kelly
Organisations have different personalities, and I find joy in understanding your organisation’s brilliant quirks, idiosyncrasies and foibles. It helps me understand what motivates your community of people, how to help you make change happen and what might make you stuck along the way to achieving your social goals. Over the last 25 years, I’ve pretty much worked in every major industry sector; with medium, large, and global organisations and with millions of workers. My clients have been in numerous industry sectors including finance, insurance, media, engineering, technology, IT, pharmaceuticals, central/ local government and emergency services. Some of my projects have taken me into all sorts of workplaces including film sets, landmark buildings, behind the scenes of luxury brands, factory canteens, sitting in police cars and ones that offer a fabulous bird’s eye view over London.
I have always worked in Business Psychology related roles focusing on helping good people, teams and organisations become great at what they do. In all the work I do, I help people to connect with each other. The employers that I tend to help best are already doing OK but are looking for that extra 20% of something that will make all the difference in the changes they are trying to make. As a business psychologist, its my job to find rapport with your people. I believe we all want to be valued, to contribute, to grow, to connect with our tribe. We are social animals and feeling part of a team matters. We help make a happier, productive and more meaningful experience. If you create cartoons, I promise not to bore you with a data fuelled slidedeck. If you deal in numbers, I promise not to force you to build with Lego to help explore how you’re feeling about closing a couple of offices.
Employer Services
Good work that attracts and retains
The pandemic and hybrid working have forced greater scrutiny of the quality of work – decent work is about a culture where people can feel they have a fair psychological contract, supported by suitable operational processes and sound leadership. Over time, responsibilities have inflated, benefits eroded, working hours blurred, and operational processes bottlenecked with task automation
Well workplaces
When life throws obstacles in our path, we may feel mentally below par. It is during these times that building resilience becomes crucial, enabling us to respond rather than react and recover more quickly. Employers can significantly contribute to creating a healthy workforce and empowering workers to build their resilience. Our more recent research noted the contribution of various factors such as operations management, job design, cultural messages as well as individual factors on workforce wellbeing. This work has informed the design of our services to equip individuals with the skills to better respond, as well as teams and organisations to improve work design.
Inclusive cultures
To foster better relationships, we understand the importance of active listening and recognising inequalities in power and privilege. We encourage employers and workers alike to approach situations with an open mind, learn from others, and actively work towards resolving issues stemming from power imbalances. By championing fairness, we help create an environment where every voice is valued, fostering a strong sense of equality and belonging. By challenging biases and implementing inclusive policies, we create an environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered.
Creating a win:win during change
Leading or managing change requires grit. There are so many pain points that you might face such as dealing with defiant resistance, forgotten detail, lack of route map, and that feeling of herding cats. We believe that work communities thrive when employers build meaningful partnerships with employees, as well as with stakeholders, clients, and local communities. We believe that win:win collaborations are key to achieving sustainable change, and everyone can contribute given the opportunity. By facilitating dialogue and cultivating trust, we can collectively work towards creating workplaces that benefit all.
For any of our business psychology services, please contact me to discuss what you are looking for.
Handy things to bring to an initial conversation:
- If you’re not sure what the issue or solution is, well, that’s where we can start
- A brief background or relevant history including what you’ve done so far
- The outcome(s) you are looking for
- Any constraints you have
- What you plan to be doing yourselves vs where you need help
- May be worth thinking a bit about timescales, your stakeholders, budgets, assumptions