Tees Business Tees Business issue 12 | Page 27

Serving the Teesside Business Community | 27 Do you want your organisation to survive or to thrive? Look after your people, and your people will look after your product or services - and your performance will look after itself. Now a Tees firm has launched an employee engagement system with a difference, designed to help your staff and your organisation to Thrive Help your company to By Dave Allan A unique new employee engagement system is creating a buzz among HR professionals and business owners across Teesside following its recent launch. Thrive is the brainchild of best-selling author and internationally renowned speaker Paul McGee, also known as The SUMO Guy. He has joined forces with a Tees-based MBHR Consultancy to launch an employee engagement system that promises to improve business performance and profitability by up to 20% - and, uniquely, factors in key HSE assurance standards. But this is no ordinary employee engagement system. Unlike others, Thrive factors in the six HSE stress management standards of Role, Relationships, Change, Demands, Support and Control. Therefore, it has equal focus on employee health and wellbeing, which when neglected will undermine an employee’s ability and motivation to perform. Thrive will provide the insights to drive proactive leadership and management actions and activities (primary interventions) that improve relationships, better engage your people, reduce stress and therefore boost performance, maximise potential and engage them in success Evidence that better engaged employees produce a higher performance is abundant. • Some years ago Hay Group, in their publication Engage Employees and Boost Performance, concluded that engaged employees generate 43% more revenue than disengaged ones. • The Corporate Leadership Council reported that engaged organisations grew profits as much as three times faster than their competitors. • And highly engaged organisations have the potential to reduce their staff turnover Thrive Thrive duo Paul McGee and Emma Barugh believe their employee engagement system is unique. by 87%. • A study by Watson Wyatt concluded that highly engaged staff missed 43% fewer days of work due to illness. Headquartered at the Wilton Centre, near Redcar, MBHR Consultancy launched Thrive after developing an employee engagement model that was the brainchild of Paul, author of the best-selling book ‘SUMO – Shut Up, Move On’. Emma Barugh, managing director of MBHR Consultancy, is confident Thrive can revolutionise employee engagement, especially for companies with more than 50 staff. Emma went into partnership with Paul – an operator she describes as “a plain-speaking genius” - in April last year. They are now rolling out a system designed to reduce staff sickness absence and employee turnover whilst increasing staff performance and company profitability. She is looking to engage with business owners, HR specialists and operating chiefs across the North-East to tell them what Thrive can do for their business. She said: “It’s a fact that people who are engaged work better, are more committed to their organisation and want to do better for their employer. “Thrive provides an opportunity to improve the working environment for your people – which, in turn, will improve performance and profitability by up to 20%. “Studies have shown that by increasing employee engagement, you can reduce sickness absence by up to 43%, employee turnover by up to 87% and increase performance by up to 20%. “Thrive is based on leading employee engagement studies that we’ve turned into plain English to allow those responsible for their organisations’ HR to boost performance, maximise potential and engage to achieve successful outcomes.” Thrive allows organisations with more than a handful of people to see quickly and easily how those individual relationships combine at an organisational, directorate, function and/or team level. This allows the leadership and management team to spot trends and patterns, and respond to these positively but most importantly proactively to improve the working relationships and environment. Thrive will provide the insights to drive proactive leadership and management actions and activities – “primary interventions” – that improve relationships, reduce stress and better engage your people. Emma adds: “Whilst the system works for employers with a minimum of 10 to 30 staff, we’re particularly keen to speak with those with 50 or more employees, and up to thousands.” For more details about Thrive, email [email protected] or call 0330 333 0356.