Our approach.
We start small, by attending to a few immediate obstacles in people and organizational structure.
Our secret sauce is consistently aligning people development priorities with evolving organizational and operational needs, the hallmark of strong organizational development. Typically, this can involve (but is rarely limited to) the following areas.
Streamline processes in team operations, communication, project management, and organizational systems and software.
Develop leadership and key personnel through performance counselling and mentorship consulting, focussing on advancement and succession planning.
Conduct internal 'fit' assessments to identify high-growth potential personnel for role expansion, or repurposing, towards changing organizational investments.
Mentor teams to strengthen efficacy in emotional regulation, significantly reducing burnout, conflict, and turnover associated costs.
Counsel and support key personnel creating friction, demonstrating role disengagement and burnout, or are turnover risks.
As ROI is measured, we can reliably forecast future investments in human capital and organizational culture, setting the table for long-term systemic success.
Our purpose.
Most people are innately good, collaborative, driven, empathic and helpful.
Most of us also carry personal, familial, and cultural burdens with us that unconsciously influence our daily interactions. When working closely with each other, these individual burdens can often become triggered and layer over our natural goodness, creating negative feedback loops.
Unattended to, this breeds into an organization, affecting our collective environment.
Employees become self-protective, gradually becoming more avoidant, or confrontational, and prioritize their own interests. Communication breaks down, projects are delayed, and innovative thinking takes a hit. Burnout frequency ramps for some, others demonstrate disconnection in their work, as productivity stagnates.
Most tangibly felt, turnover is always an internal discussion point, and costs associated with attracting, onboarding, and retaining valued talent are needlessly high.
This pattern is particularly common in employing emerging generations, who migrate between organizations more frequently.
By extension, an organization is a system, made up of every characteristic, every dynamic, and every burden of its people.
This means attending to, and healing, specific parts of the system benefits the whole. Likewise, a system is made stronger and more resilient when each individual feels connected to each other; we fight harder, we care more, we anchor into our environment.
This is our purpose, to add a bit of humanity, care, and connectedness into our work environments.
We are not here to change the world. Rather, attend to the system with a few pointed and specific investments that make a meaningful difference to all an organization’s people, and unsurprisingly, its bottom-line.
Many companies now actively look for the same, those whose “practice is grounded in employee advocacy and looking for holistic solutions that meet folks where they are at in any given moment while simultaneously moving the business toward meaningful results”
— OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT)
Broadening perspectives.
Emerging generations
The role of career and the workplace in Western culture is evolving. Many organizations attempt to attract and engage their workforce through traditional incentivizing practices, such as promotion in title, monetary rewards, and linear role growth.
Both research and practical experience make it clear 一 these do not captivate long-term engagement, and more often hinder it.
This is particularly true for emerging generations (Millennials, Generation Z), who regularly seek to develop a diverse skill set. Often this pursuit is grounded in an attempt to better understand and actualize the self, through exploration and contribution to many facets of an organization.
Emerging generations also attach more strongly to organizational cultures that balance a working relationship with a network of psycho-social support. This means feeling accepted and supported in expressing and exploring all parts of their personality, including personal challenges, with those around them.
Organizations successful in this instill a much deeper sense of community, engagement, and camaraderie, ultimately enhancing performance and emotional wellbeing of the entire system.
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB)
The foundation of Western education, policy, and values systems have been predominantly shaped by caucasian thought leaders and perspectives. This perpetuates colonial undermining that inordinately suppress and discriminate against Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC).
As a result, generations of capable and valuable perspectives, ancestral knowledge, and lived experiences go under-represented, under-respected, and under-utilized.
Diversity is a topic most of us can agree is important, but struggle to comfortably and authentically engage with, regardless of background. Less understood is the organizational value in educating, and facilitating discussion, around the most important psychological, social, and cultural issues enmeshed within BIPOC communities today. As leaders, we have a social and financial responsibility to our organizations to understand the value being ‘left on the table’ by ignoring systemic racism, prejudice, discrimination and misogyny that permeates into our work environments.
Facing this head-on, organizations create an opportunity to redefine their own narrative, establishing a culture of continual learning and exploration, rather than one cemented in a particular stance in time.
In attending to and healing these burdens, organizations substantially improve performance of BIPOC employees, stimulate new diverse organizational thought and perspective, and make themselves significantly more attractive to diverse under-utilized talent. Doing so also helps break down preconceived barriers between staff, encouraging more authentic engagement and relationships across cultural backgrounds, improving team performance and workplace attachment.
Artificial intelligence
Today’s economic environment is marred with high interest rates, inflation, and contraction in aspects of consumer demand. Organizations across industry are being pushed to tighten their budgets. At the same time, large language models, generative AI and modern cloud technology are becoming increasingly adept. As a result, organizations are incentivized to phase out traditional human business practices in pursuit of cost savings and significantly faster data processing.
This coming shift is particularly apparent within traditional HR domains, such as administrative, policy, training, and hiring practices.
So what then is the future of the HR function? Most organizations still don’t know this answer. Even fewer are asking these kinds of questions.
As competition for top-tier technology talent continues to be incredibly fierce, competitive organizations will increasingly begin reallocating previous HR investment towards developing employee psychological and emotional well-being. Data-driven organizations reresearch, measure, and cognize the return on investment of strategically developing, mentoring, and counselling their people. And forward-thinking organizations will recognize organizationally-aligned counselling, assessment, and support as normative, and emotional resilience and intelligence as a must.
This reallocation in HR investment makes a meaningful difference to all an organization’s people, fundamentally changing how talent evaluates, engages with, and attaches to an organization. Every phase of the employee lifecycle will be impacted.
Unsurprisingly, this transformation also profits the bottom-line, exponentially reducing burnout, conflict, on/off-boarding, and turnover associated costs. Most importantly, the organization cultivates a ‘network effect’, encouraging authenticity, empathy, and engagement within its greater systemic culture. People feel accepted in being themselves, and naturally, their best performance comes forward.
AI will make another wave. It is here already. We must rethink everything.