So, you’ve heard of a business-performance consultant, but what is it they actually do? You may find a performance consultant is exactly what you need to take the next step with your organisations' development. As many know, with just training alone, you will not get your return on investment unless you change a few factors within the organisation, this is where performance consulting comes in.
Learning and performance consulting is a great approach with recent outstanding results that helps all types of organisations combat low-performance issues of employees and the company as a whole and/or find the correct steps to move the organisation forward towards its goals. The consultant will analyse all types of data from within the organisation, as well as talk to leaders and employees individually in order to gain an idea of the workplace and factors such as employee engagement, customer satisfaction, currently provided training, leadership styles, company goals, etc. Performance consulting is conducted over a long period of time but in doing so it will also produce the top long term results for a multitude of businesses.
Often leaders will hire a performance consultant when their employees aren’t performing at their ideal rate or when they aren’t sure how to improve their organisation in order to meet their next highest goals. Meetings will be held to identify these goals, their importance, impact, and achievability, in order for a business goal to meet the achievable criteria it must be both specific and measurable in order to conduct the correct plan to attain it, as well as plot progress along the way in order to meet the desired deadline. For example, “increase sales” is far too vague, if we’re looking at an organisation with cashiers, the goal would look something like “complete the check-out process at a faster pace to increase sales” or “Better our advertisement teams performance to meet a larger number of people in order to increase sales”.
Some assume a consultant is a glorified trainer of some sort, now although performance consultants can and do offer training as part of the solution, it is rarely the only solution due to other smaller factors being able to greatly affect performance levels and often times, training isn't what is needed at all. The Devlinpeck gives a few examples of non-training problems such as;
The point-of-sale software that the cashiers are using cannot keep up with how quickly they are trying to scan the products.
The marketing team funnels lead to the sales team, but the leads do not match the sales team's desired target audience (although this may indicate a reason to provide training for the marketing staff).
The nurses are assigned to care for more patients than they could possibly attend to in a single night.
And a few extra examples are;
Long customer wait times and high complaints
Low sales performance due to lack of belief in the process or lack of knowledge around how the products can help customers.
Lack of teamwork and employee cohesion
New employees leaving the company within the first year
Training is still a crucial part of an employee's development at the workplace and can provide incredible results, but traditional training methods have been made specifically to help those with a lack of knowledge or skills, so training completely misses the mark when deeper rooted issues arise within the organisation. The correct solution must be provided to every individual issue within the workplace and it must continue to be carried out effectively the entire way through the process. It can seem like a daunting amount of work at times, but that is exactly where performance consultants come in.
Many leaders are still sceptical of performance consultants, this is sometimes due to the old reputation when consultancy was a newer profession that didn't have much or next to no scientific backup and most of what consultants did was experimental as there was a strong marriage between business book theories and consultant advice. But now in more recent times, consultancy is backed up by things such as psychology and/or technology science, their improvements within businesses are measurable and seen within feedback reviews and there are key factors you can selectively look out for when choosing a performance consultant. The factors that make an effective performance consultant Range from qualifications, experience, people skills, analytics skills, conflict management, technical skills and more.
The Modern Mind Group are emotioneering human performance not engineering it.
As people operations and performance consultants, we work with your business to identify and improve performance gaps so that you can be more profitable and professionally develop your people. Over 12 years of expertise in people operations and performance with results to back it all up. Why settle for the average when there is a world of possibility when you know how to achieve it? Untapped potential - Let's go get it!