A big thanks to BESA for arranging a fantastic awards evening at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Manchester on Saturday evening celebrating the achievements of the building engineering services sector in the North West of England. Fantastic to see the success of apprentices, who are vital to the future success of the industry and to the businesses in the region.

I was really pleased that our investment in training was recognised too, winning the Employer Training Initiative of the Year.

Although technical skills are essential we have found real business benefit comes from improving ‘softer skills’, hence the development of our bespoke Personal Effectiveness (PE) course, which has since been enhanced to focus on leadership, persuasion and motivation.

Consequently, we set about developing a training programme that focussed on improving our team’s self-management and interpersonal skills.

We initially developed a Personal Effectiveness (PE) training programme with modules including: ‘effective communication’, time management ’, ‘team working, effective meetings’, leadership, and coaching, which provided a great starting point.

However, after having completed a ‘Living Leader’ course myself, I worked with a training provider to develop a new training course that built on the foundations of the Personal Effectiveness course while taking inspiration from the Living Leader programme.

Our new programme was designed to build progressively on individual skills such as communication and time management through to higher-level collective skills such as team working and leadership.

While leadership training and its transformational effects on organisations is well established, it remains an unusual step for a company of our size. However, we recognise that providing a best-in-class service to our clients requires effective collaboration and so are committed to continuous investment in this area.

The expertise and professionalism of our people and our process-driven approach provide the foundations for smooth project delivery but it is the culture and behaviours of our staff that ensure an enhanced customer experience. We can see that our programme has improved the team’s performance considerably, helping to provide better customer service and subsequently, we have found a direct correlation between the roll out of this programme and the growth in repeat business.

We are delighted with the impact that the course has had on our business but as you can see from the direct feedback below this course has had a positive impact on home life too:-

 "The Living Leaders course is a real eye opener, thought provoking, particularly in terms of the impact your behaviour has on customers and colleagues of all levels’’.

"The personal effectiveness course was excellent, benefitting me professionally and personally, getting me to stop and think about my behaviours and the power of positive feedback and appreciation.’’

The course, which takes 6 days to complete, has now been delivered to over 70% of our team. However, this investment has had such a positive impact on our culture that we are rolling out two 6-day courses again this year to another 20 delegates.