Our core mission centres on the helping businesses and individuals develop and grow by focusing on building skills and understanding the dynamics within a team. That being the case, when you engage Iluminar to support you with a training and development project, an element of that will include our advice with respect to plans and the design of your course or programme. However, should you be looking for consultancy solely for your own planning purposes and detached from specific training delivery, Iluminar can also support you as an independent, innovative, yet pragmatic advisor, who is able to help you look at your existing human resources strategy and making realistic plans for the future. Some examples of situations where Iluminar can help:
Many companies, particularly small to medium sized enterprises, who have plans for growth – may have carefully targeted their new markets and plotted where sales will be generated. However, in moving your business from step A to B, have you carefully considered the impact on your people? Do they have the skills to support your growth plans? If not, where are the gaps and how do you fill them? Do you have enough people and do you now the areas in which you will have to recruit if your plan is successful? What impact will that have on your organisational structure and are your managers equipped with skills to lead a larger team?
Iluminar can bring support and insights to helping you prepare a robust people strategy that works in harmony with your business plans and forecast.
Building a new team whether to manage a business or operationally run a section, can be challenging. Bringing individuals together to work effectively can take time and savvy leadership in terms of both selection and ongoing management. Iluminar can provide advice to team leaders and help generate ideas to facilitate the team building process, whether through working with individuals in the group or team sessions to assist members understand how to get the best out of each other and communicate effectively.
Whether for good reasons or bad, change can be a powerful stressor on people and can adversely impact businesses if not handled carefully. Whether the change arises from new technology, new business, updated processes or upsizing or downsizing, transformations can be traumatic for individuals and teams and need careful planning to negotiate minimal impact on your business. Where changes are being introduced to bring about benefits, savings and improvements, the way in which your people cope and embrace the ‘new world’ will usual be pivotal to its success. Keeping them informed and involved is vital in order to bring them along with you on the journey and we can support you in designing ways to do just that.
Nothing can limit the potential of an organisation more than an unhappy team. Not everyone can be happy all the time, but deep-rooted, sustained discontent can consume huge quantities of management time in trying to keep operations running at a basic level. Counter to popular opinion, wages are not always the source of unhappiness in work forces and there may be some simple changes and commitments that organisations can make that will, with time and follow-through, bring about changes in how their employees think and feel about the company and their role within it. Iluminar can help you review your current practices and strategy and through consultation, take an independent view of the reasons behind any conflicts and how they might be addressed.
As businesses grow and change there is a periodic need to review and evaluate the efficiency and adequacy of the processes people follow. Organisations can bend themselves terribly out of shape by forcing delivery through a model or process that is outdated or designed for another service altogether. As well as helping with the subsequent impact of changing processes on your people, we can initially, through consultation and workshop facilitation, help you create, document, review or re-map processes for your evolving business.
Some examples of situations where Iluminar can help:
As businesses grow and employees increase, simple processes that were once conducted by maybe a single person, now require multiple steps and individuals to handle bigger volumes. It is not unusual for this evolution to happen organically without any particular planning and as a consequence, it can result in overlapping activities or unnecessary multiple checks leading to inefficiencies and delays - that only become more pronounced as your workload increases. Stepping back and having a facilitator like us help you review and map your processes can reveal the pinch points and doubling up that may have gone unnoticed. We can then support you in re-mapping your processes to avoid these problems and in defining your people’s roles more clearly within the new process, to avoid confusion and helping your work flow more efficiently.
There is constant temptation for businesses to try and improve the way they work with better, up to date technology. This may be hardware livee smart phones or tablets, off-the-shelf software packages for small business or bespoke workflow systems designed to meet your exact needs. There is no doubt that technology can be an enormous support to your organisation, but experience shows that there is a danger of putting the cart before the horse. Before investing in technology it can be wise to review your processes first. That way you can use your new IT to underpin your latest working model, rather than shore up a old inefficient process. Iluminar can help you facilitate the process review, then if you wish, we can work with your IT provider during the design and implementation phases to help you incorporate the process improvements as well as support your people in managing the change.
Companies need to evolve and explore new products and services. It is natural to pilot new services in parallel to your existing ones and use your current systems and processes to deliver them, even if those are not entirely appropriate. These will likely work sufficiently until such point as a new idea takes off and you are suddenly delivering the new service to the same extent as (or more than) the old ones and suddenly your processes are at best inefficient or at worst can’t cope. We can help you prepare for the pivotal point where a new service thrives by facilitating your planning of revised or new processes to accommodate your new business whether in combination with older services or as a separate line altogether.
