What we do
A decision made in a boardroom means nothing if you don't change the daily actions of thousands of your people.
Many organisations find that the hardest part about changing things in their business is not deciding what to do, but actually getting it to happen.
At BB&A we enable organisations to involve their people in a broad range of key strategic challenges.
Business issues we help address
1.) Delivering your strategy
The leadership and senior teams of corporations and organisations may know their businesses and strategies inside out, but many companies struggle to translate these theories into actions for the people on the ‘front-line’. In order for strategies to be successfully implemented and sustained people need to understand them and be truly motivated and engaged to want to deliver the aims and goals of the business.
2.) Managing Performance
Before you can improve performance you need to able to measure it. Without measurement, there is no way of telling you how people are performing against your business’ goals. But if your managers and employees don’t see the benefit of using the systems and processes available to measure their performance it is impossible to know how to improve the overall performance of the business.
3.) Improving the customer experience
Many organisations spend huge sums of money on marketing their brand and products to attract new customers but at the same time the experience they provide to existing customers may be undermined. There is not much value in incurring the cost of attracting new customers if you can’t retain them. For organisations to develop better customer relationships, employees need to understand their role and need to be excited about what they are doing.
4.) Culture change
Change is something that is constantly happening, the difficulty is making the right change for your organisation – and then helping people to understand how to ‘live’ the change.
5.) Living the brand
Many organisations spend a lot of time and money on developing their brand to attract customers but they often neglect to ensure that their employees fully understand their role in delivering the brand experience. There is not much value in developing the brand externally if it will be undermined by employees who don’t understand the importance of their role re-enforcing the brand and therefore, don’t ‘live the brand’.
6.) Corporate Social Responsibility
Research tells us that employees who are satisfied with their organisation's commitment to social and environmental responsibility are likely to be more positive, more engaged and more productive than those working for less responsible employers. It is therefore crucial that your people understand what the business is doing within this area and how they as individuals can contribute.
7.) Understanding how business works
If your people understand how business ‘works’ – where money comes from (revenue) and where it goes (costs) – they are much better placed to help you deliver your overall goals, profitably. Improving the level of business understanding within your workforce can help generate new ideas and even gain buy-in to difficult decisions such as cost-cutting or redundancies.
8.) A new product launch
Businesses invest heavily in launching new products and services but often fail to ensure that their sales and marketing people and distributor networks understand how to sell them. When people have a thorough understanding of how the product/service is different from its competitors and how it will make a difference to the customers, they will sell with more confidence which in turn will drive sales performance.
9.) Driving sales performance
Sales people can become ‘stale’ selling the ‘same old product’ but with a fresh look at the marketplace, their competition and what their customers think of them and their competitors, they can often become ‘re-inspired’, which in turn will drive sales performance.
10.) Improving business acumen
The business environment is forever changing and businesses cannot, therefore, rely exclusively on their senior people to make sense of the changing business world. Helping people elsewhere in the organisation to identify and assess new business opportunities can be critical to ensuring future business success.
11.) Living the company values
Companies don’t have values – people do. But companies do have their own peculiar ‘ways of doing things’ which determine the way things get done. Ensuring everyone understands the ‘values’ and acts in line with them is often crucial to the success of organisations large and small.
12.) A merger or acquisition
A merger or acquisition often fails because of cultural differences between the organisations rather than because of the deal not making business sense.
The reality is that business performance is driven largely by an organisation’s people - their skills, innovative ideas and ability to stay engaged during difficult transition periods. Therefore, one of the key components of a successful merger or acquisition (alongside strong and visible leadership) is to make sure people feel involved in shaping the future and understand how they can contribute.
13.) Delivering business transformation
Transforming your business may require new products or services, new tools and processes and/or new skills for your people, but one thing it certainly will need if you are to succeed – the buy-in and commitment of your people. Ensuring people are involved throughout your transformation process is key and not doing it is a sure-fire way of transforming your business for the worse!
14.) Compliance
Compliance with regulations or company policies is often key to running a successful business. Managers and employees need to understand the policies and more importantly know how to behave in accordance with them
15.) Diversity and Inclusion
Compliance with company policies like non-discrimination, equal opportunities and anti-bullying and harassment is key to running a successful business. Managers and employees need to understand the policies and more importantly know how to behave in accordance with them.
16.) Developing better leaders
What’s the difference between a manager and a leader? Good leaders are followed chiefly because people trust and respect them, rather than the skills they possess. Leadership often relies on management skills too, but more so on qualities such as integrity, humility and courage. Creating strong leadership at all levels of an organization is key to having a successful business and an engaged workforce.
17.) Understanding processes
Often, new business processes are poorly received by the people for whom the process had been designed for. Without having a clear understanding of why a process is being implemented and how it will help the business, people are often reluctant to start using it and in many cases revert to the ‘old way’ of doing things. By making sure people are involved in the process ‘re-design’, engaged in why the organisation has decided on the new process and what it will achieve, people are much more likely to adopt it.
18.) Health & Safety
Despite millions of pounds spent on safety processes businesses still suffer catastrophes. Research shows that often such disasters happen as a result of mistakes by individuals. The key to operating safely is to develop a ‘culture of safety’ and ensuring employees understand what it means to them and their role in delivering it day-to-day.
19.) Innovation
Recent research indicates that involving your people in your business goals is a powerful factor in ensuring innovative thinking. Whether you want to improve business processes, develop new product or service ideas or improve the customer experience, employees are much more likely to contribute if they are actively engaged in your business.