Inviting a team of consultants to recommend and facilitate change within a business is a difficult decision. Concerns over whether they will listen to, and integrate with, in-house teams are commonplace.
Additional fears that consultancies have priorities which can cause conflict, often result in businesses never seeking help and, consequently, failing to reach their true potential.
So, how can a company eliminate these risks when instructing business consultants? Choosing a consultancy with similar values and a culture that meshes well with your own is a good start.
Honesty, respect, and collaboration
Here at Clarasys, we have worked hard to foster a culture of honesty, respect, and collaboration.
Throughout our ten-year journey, we’ve trusted our people to make key structural decisions that entrench our culture irrevocably.
We draw upon our experiences at Clarasys and previous companies to shape these decisions. The result is an organisation that puts its clients and people first.
We prioritise collaboration and delivering quality outcomes, and our mission is to deliver change that continues to add value long after we’ve left.
One of our first key structural decisions was to do away with commercial forces that would distract us from delivering quality work. Our employee-owned business is unaccountable to the demands of partners or external shareholders, which allows our culture, and the way we work, to be defined by our people.
At Clarasys, we understand the complexity of delivering projects on time and within budget. We know the importance of looking outwards, not inwards, when defining ‘success’. For us, success is whether we’ve delivered, to our client’s satisfaction, what we promised, not the number of extensions we’ve won.
Financial targets cloud judgements
Our company structure contains no ‘cash’ incentives – we have no employee sales targets, bonuses, or commission. Such financial targets can cloud a consultant’s judgement. This structure is intentional and ensures that our employees’ sole focus is what’s best for the client.
Instead, our people are measured on direct feedback from clients, and how well the client teams operate after we leave. This means our people will often make recommendations to build up the client’s internal capabilities, rather than extend projects.
We aim to upskill the client team, so that when we leave they have the tools and knowledge to continue without us. As a senior client at SASC said, “Clarasys were effective in how they managed to leave us in a situation where we could get on with things ourselves.”
To do this successfully, we recognise our people need to work well within client teams to surmount the “us and them” environment. As such, a higher level of collaboration is one of our most important values and this is instilled in our employees from day one. Every new Clarasys consultant attends a two-day emotional intelligence course to help inform their understanding of team dynamics and what makes people tick. This equips us with the skills we need to immerse ourselves within client teams to avoid siloed working, and ensure our clients enjoy working with us on a personal level.
Employee experience
At Clarasys, we specialise in building experiences for employees that bring them onboard, enable them to perform, and facilitate personal growth. We take a three-pronged approach to Employee Experience (EX), covering human organisational relationships, the physical working environment, and available tech tools. This ensures we’re engaging all levels and facets of an organisation, so that any change meets expectations. At Clarasys, we know that organisations tend to underestimate many of the factors at play when it comes to EX, so we designed this approach to ensure nothing is left to chance. How are we so confident? Because we’ve done it ourselves.
One senior client from a global organisation in the information services industry said: “Clarasys consultants definitely have a style that makes them different from other consultants – I think that comes from their leadership and their ownership. You get a sense of being closer to them – I know that I can speak to senior members of the team at the drop of a hat. They have a closer understanding of the organisation they are working with. I believe they have the right methodology and believe in what they are doing. I think their ultimate aim is to help us achieve what we are trying to achieve, rather than to necessarily continually be looking to make a profit.“
The success of a client-consultant relationship often rests on two factors: can you trust the consultants, and do they work well with your internal team? We strived to build a unique structure at Clarasys that gives our consultants the freedom to truly focus on the client’s objectives and become a part of client teams, not an appendage. And we believe it’s this culture of honesty, true collaboration, and a commitment to doing the right thing for our clients that drives not only our success, but also that of our clients.