At the Personnel Today Awards 2023 Parent and Professional was crowned Small HR Consultancy of the Year because, say the judges, it is a consultancy that ‘clearly delivers results within its niche and provides specific and sophisticated solutions to a particular area of people strategy challenge’. We profile the winner and the work of the other shortlisted firms in this keenly contested category.

WINNER

Parent and Professional

Parent and Professional was established more than 14 years ago by Helen Letchfield and Henriette Phillips. As new parents, they used their shared experiences to help others to navigate this critical life stage. The company has pioneered its own qualification – the Parental Transition Coaching Qualification – to help organisations better support working parents and carers as they juggle responsibilities.

P&P aims to influence organisational change at a cultural level, offering maternity coaching but also helping employers adopt a more comprehensive approach to inclusion. Many of its competitors focus only on support for women in this transition, when there are many benefits from supporting fathers to manage the balance between parental responsibility and work. It also now supports companies with other inclusion areas such as menopause, gendered ageism and biases, and promoting women’s health.

Successes include working with ADM on supporting employees in pivotal life stages such as menopause and balancing work responsibilities; a working dads’ initiative at Sidley; and a parental transition coaching programme at Legal & General. Feedback from clients includes: “The internal response so far has been fantastic, with 96 managers attending the webinar and a flood of positive comments and feedback around how much the webinar helped raise awareness and understanding in a topic which has not been openly spoken about”; and “my coach has changed my life”.

RUNNERS-UP

Bailes Partners Consulting

Established in 2021, BPC works with organisations that have a strong social purpose and who are enthusiastic about supporting leaders to move away from traditional models of leadership to new ways of inspiring their people to outperform expectations. The team collectively has years of experience in running teams and services, and connecting HR strategy to culture and business objectives.

BPC worked with rock climbing and yoga centre Yonder on an evaluation of its organisational culture. The focus was on leadership, performance and customer service. The company made recommendations on decision-making in line with Yonder’ purpose and values; developing more commercial thinking around costs and risk; psychological safety in the business; and clarity of objectives and how well the workforce understands business goals.

After providing the leadership team with a helicopter view of their organisation, BPC worked with them to identify how to translate recommendations into their own actions, and coached them towards a more mature structure. Other successful consulting projects include supporting Peabody to become an approved apprenticeship training provider and working with social housing landlord ForHousing on a decision-making structure.

Let’s Talk Talent

Let’s Talk Talent (LTT) is a talent management and organisational development consultancy that aims to create world-class employee experiences. It worked with Catapult Cell and Gene Therapy on its challenges with retention. The biotech incubator had been experiencing a talent drain in a competitive market for candidates. At the same time, current employees were starting to look for other opportunities as they felt they did not have a clear career plan.

LTT looked at every touchpoint in the employee experience at Catapult, from its employee value proposition to its recruitment processes, career development opportunities and performance management. The aim was to create a consistent experience that linked everything together and lived up to people’s expectations. A plan was devised to keep all stakeholders involved in every major decision, and the HR team reported on results at executive level.

It built competency frameworks to design recruitment deliverables and to inform the performance review process, and then built a ‘STAR’ map that would reflect each employee’s role and ambitions and the skills they would need to move up to the next level. Attrition has gone down from 30.66% to 10.53% in the space of eight months, and the Career Conversation training course has one of the highest feedback scores in the business. Other successes include building a parent coaching programme for a client that felt its policies did not provide enough support around career progression.

Oculus HR

Oculus HR is an HR consultancy, based in north east England, working with a range of clients from automotive to schools on employment law or other workplace issues. The company consults with clients to tailor bespoke solutions to their business needs, and its offering includes a retainer service, coaching and mentoring for HR managers, and HR masterclasses. It also has a podcast, called Real World HR.

In 2023 Oculus celebrated its 10th birthday after a record trading year in 2022, achieving 32% growth. One successful project was with Queensway Orthodontics, where Oculus helped the company deal with significant growth in headcount. It held workshops to establish relationships and support areas; reviewed HR documentation; updated policies and procedures; reviewed contracts to support working from home and offered training and support to managers and HR. Another was with View Logistics, working on attendance management challenges. Its guidance helped the company establish clear guidelines and a notable improvement in sickness rates.

One client asked Oculus to support it with allegations of bullying, and the company stepped in to support the HR team who were lacking in confidence and suffered from low morale. In this case, as in others, Oculus’ intervention meant that managers could build the confidence to deal with issues themselves, improving retention and supporting business growth.

The TCM Group

The TCM Group is a growing conflict and culture change consultancy, with a team of 16 employees. It was established over two decades ago by CEO and chief consultant David Liddle. Recent research from Acas shows that workplace conflict costs employers almost £30 billion per year as they deal with informal, formal and legal processes alongside sickness absence and resignations.

The TCM Group holds that a traditional model of HR and a reliance on formal policies for dealing with conflict can exacerbate many of the problems in our workplaces. During the last 12 months, it has been working on helping clients transform their culture in three key areas: the People and Culture Association, which offers a safe space for members to engage in dialogue and access resources to help shift their approach; supporting clients with a Resolution Framework, which acts as an alternative to formal grievance policies; and raising awareness of the root causes of industrial unrest.

Successes include Burberry designing a new global framework and taking a people-centred, dialogue-driven approach to workplace issues which has seen an increase in conflicts being resolved informally. Next also completed a diagnostic review with TCM and established a Resolution Framework in June this year. One client wrote: “Fantastic course content and knowledgeable trainer that brought experiences to life. I feel much better prepared and confident to deal with mediation going forward.”

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