Meet Banyards and learn about the challenge they faced with their HR.
Banyards Consultants is a leading consultancy offering forward-thinking engineering solutions that lead to energy-efficient buildings. The company designs building services from conception to completion and offers Commissioning Management and validation services to confirm compliance.
The company employs more than 60 staff and, after a decade of growth, a desire to put a renewed focus on people management led Managing Director Nick Till to ask Reality HR to benchmark its HR processes and take its HR provision to the next level.
“What the company stands for – core beliefs, core values, is very important to staff. It’s about defining what you do as a business, how you do it and why. Now, we can hold people to account on those values as much as measuring them in what they do in their role. It changes the agenda.” NICK TILL – MANAGING DIRECTOR
Key to this was an exercise in defining the mission and core values of the business and its people. This exercise was at the beginning of a long-standing partnership which has seen Reality HR’s consultants effectively becoming an integral part of the team at Banyards, providing regular support with people management, staff development and issues handling. The team at Reality HR supported Banyards in maintaining Gold Investors in People Standard.
This ongoing partnership has reshaped the way Banyards engages with its employees at every stage of the employment cycle.
The action taken by Reality HR
After discussions with directors about the business’s direction, aims and priorities, the first exercise was an HR healthcheck. This was a complete audit of the people management mechanisms in place at Banyards, and how they could be developed in support of the company’s vision.
A key project was an exercise around the business’s culture and values, which brought the senior management team together for a day-long workshop to explore the desired behaviours and values of ‘a Banyards person’. The outcome was a list of new values that were communicated to the workforce and built into performance reviews and the recruitment process, so that for new and existing employees alike, the values become embedded in the culture.
Since the implementation of the recommendations in the healthcheck, Reality HR has supported Banyards day-to-day with a full range of HR services including reviewing documents, contracts and handbooks; salary benchmarking; and working with the business to develop its rewards and benefits strategy. Annual or six-monthly appraisals were replaced with more regular performance management catch-ups to talk about performance, planning and learning and development.
The outcome
Banyards has effective day-to-day support from Reality HR and managers are trained, supported and equipped to deal more confidently with their teams, especially when issues arise. Crucially, Reality HR’s consultant team have developed a deep understanding of the business and its employees. This means the team are able to develop ways of working that suit the business best – for example, the difficulty in getting staff members based in different parts of the country together for training was resolved by the use of webinars, hosted by Reality HR, that were highly effective and enthusiastically received.
As MD, Nick has been able to see how the core values exercise and the ongoing support has enabled a tangible shift in culture and helped managers to get more out of their teams.
“We are a people business – we don’t sell a product, we sell expertise,” he says. “You have to be responsible for your own actions in demonstrating the behaviours that we are committed to. These are now becoming embedded in the business.”
“The team at Reality HR understand our business, and because they are impartial and external, they can take an objective view. They have been very proactive and given us good advice, becoming trusted partners, and effectively a key part of the team at Banyards.” NICK TILL – MANAGING DIRECTOR