Business Psychology
People-focused business growthDISCOVER THE POWER OF …
The Helping Organisation
CULTIVATING COMPASSION FOR CORPORATE SUCCESS
Would you like your customers to rave about you behind your back?
Would you like your workforce to be more emotionally resilient?
Would you like to have a competitive advantage that increases profitability?
Build a reputation as THE HELPING ORGANISATION
and you’ll improve productivity and drive profit for your business in three key areas:
Cultivating a compassionate culture
Increases …
- Employee motivation and satisfaction
- Employee retention and engagement
- Trust and innovation
- Customer service
Cultivating compassionate leaders
Reduces …
- Stress
- Risk of burnout
Cultivating a compassionate workforce
Improves …
- Commitment to the organisation
- Health and wellbeing
- Customer service
- Team-working
- Learning and innovation
All organisations suffer from everyday inefficiencies
that have a huge impact on how well the organisation performs
*miscommunication and unproductive meetings
*a breakdown of trust poor leadership or management skills quiet quitting
*increased absenteeism barriers to problem-solving and innovation
*unclear boundaries that cause duplicated effort and wasted resources
As a Business Psychologist for over two decades, I have helped many clients reduce the impact of these day-to-day dramas that drain energy, time and money.
The Tripart Framework of the Helping Organisation
Click the boxes to expand
COLLABORATIVE CULTURE: Where people are excited by their work ...
- Unlock the power of empathy, courage and compassion at all levels of the business
- Develop compassionate leaders to foster emotional resilience and drive productivity
- Encourage cross-department collaboration to reduce conflict, and eliminate unhelpful competition
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC: By understanding the psychology of helping you will...
- Sell with compassion by understanding customers’ needs,
- Forging stronger customer-supplier bonds
- Care for customers with empathy, to reinforce trust and loyalty
- Resolve problems in ways that resonate with the customer’s perspective
SUPPORTING OURSELVES: It begins by cultivating self-kindness...
- Discover personalised wellbeing strategies and enable your workforce to thrive amidst challenges and uncertainties
- Set professional boundaries and master assertiveness so your workforce can ask for help when they need it
- Create a healthy balance between helping others and themselves, avoiding burnout and Super-Helper Syndrome
I offer a range of solutions tailored to your needs
senior leader
coaching, Learning & Development
Team / Department
programmes
organisational
consultancy solutions
The Core Modules
becoming the helping organisation – cultural alignment
developing compassionate leadership
customer-centric
Empathic service & Relationship building
compassionate methods for internal/ external sales
establishing boundaries to sustain wellbeing
strategies for cultivating self-compassion
A variety of FORMATs
ONLINE ONLY
– PERFECT FOR REMOTE TEAMS
IN-person
– OFF-SITE AWAY DAYS
BLEND OF BOTH
ONLINE & IN-PERSON
your next step
Interested in finding out more? Then let’s talk. I can talk you through more detail and recommend an option that suits your situation, timeline and budget. Please complete the contact form below.
Complete the form below and Jess will be in contact with you within two working days.
Give your company the competitive edge
It’s evidence-based
It addresses a void that has gone unnoticed since organisations first formed!
Ignore it at your peril
Most people, even psychologists, continue to over-look the role that helping plays in all of our relationships. We ignore it when it works well, and we ignore it when it causes costly and sometimes devastating problems.
Helping is ubiquitous
Yet this is the only corporate programme specifically designed to help your organisation to be better at helping. There are very few books on the subject too, which is why I wrote one. The Super-Helper Syndrome: A Survivial Guide for Compassionate People (2022, Flint Books) is available worldwide
They’ll love you for it
Your workforce, your customers, your suppliers, and your shareholders will reap the benefits.
This does not require a complete overhaul
It simply maps onto whatever you have in place already. It does not need to, although it could, require a re-write of your competency framework, company values, recruitment process, or performance appraisal system. Instead, this is a cost-effective approach that will enhance what you already have.
WhY I WROTE THIS PROGRAMME
Helping others is my core value
I’ve a long history of it – through voluntary work, choosing a helping profession, working with health and social care entities, supporting charities at Board level, writing an award-winning book on helping.
Helping good people have more power
As R.S Hartman said, ‘Why do good people never have as much power as bad people?”. I want to help good people to have a greater impact, whether that’s by strengthening their boundaries to prevent them from being exploited, or to have the self-belief to hold senior positions. The world needs them more than ever.
I wanted to make it really easy
Helping others is a complex and misunderstood theme, and while some of my clients have ‘compassion’ as an organisational value, it is still usually overlooked. Or it gets confused with other concepts such as empathy and kindness. But once you know, as I do, what to tweak, and how, there is a huge and wonderful impact awaiting everyone in your organisation.
Simply register your interest on the form above to connect with me, and embark on your journey towards cultivating compassion for corporate success and becoming The Helpful Organisation.
Other Business Psychology Solutions
Here’s an overview of the types of projects I deliver for my clients
Leadership Development
The best leaders manage themselves as well as they engage and motivate others.
They are resilient, self-motivated, use creative problem-solving techniques, and make decisions that are aligned to the organisation’s vision.
Organisations with good leaders, and a diverse top-team, out-perform their competitors.
But you know this already.
Maybe you are doing your best to enable, empower and challenge your leaders to be the best versions of themselves.
Maybe you’ve run a few leadership development programmes that your middle-senior managers have been required to attend.
Perhaps it’s time for you to try something specifically tailored to your own organisational needs, and the needs of your managers.
All managers are not the same. (Nor are we consultants).
If there’s a reason why your middle managers or senior leadership team aren’t performing as well as you’d like them to, let’s talk.
Organisational Culture
Your strongest competitors have aligned their company values to their competency framework. They use that competency framework to attract, recruit, manage and develop their employees to ensure that each one is engaged and productive.
Unfortunately, displaying happy posters in the lobby is not enough to change a culture. It takes a deep understanding of your business to develop a values-based culture. Luckily for me, as a self-professed qualitative data queen, I get very excited when clients ask me to help them do this (e.g. appreciative inquiry, repertory grid analysis, critical incident technique interviews, focus groups and geeking on NVivo software. Love it all).
Your organisation’s culture is brought to life through your
- defined core values
- future-proof competency framework
- on-boarding process and effective recruitment practices
- simple and assertive performance management / performance planning
- practical and meaningful employee development
It can feel like a daunting transition, but I take clients through a step-by-step process, that, with the comms and stakeholder mapping in place, can feel seamless, even enjoyable.
If you would like to redefine your organisation’s core values or competency framework, or want to embed them across your existing processes, drop me an email at hello@jessbaker.co.uk or book a consultation call via the button below.
Assessment & Selection
Do your people have the right…?
- Skills and ability
- Attitude and motivation
- Values
Your strongest competitors are investing heavily on improving their recruitment process: having a clear job description, explicit pre-requisites, using structured interviews and objective assessment methods.
Your strongest competitors know that having a fit-for-purpose end-to-end hiring process is easier to track and more cost-effective than leaving things to chance.
I’ve designed and implemented end-to-end recruitment processes, assessment centres and high-profile individual assessment for national and international companies.
If you’d like to find out how I can help you to recruit and retain the right people for your organisation, let’s talk. Click the Discovery Call button below and chose a time that suits you.
Employee Wellbeing
“Wellbeing” might sound like a bit of a fad. A lot of organisations seem to be randomly adding the word ‘wellbeing’ to job titles in the hope that it will actually have some impact. But employee wellbeing has to be taken seriously.
It’s a costly matter for any company to get wrong. Dissatisfied employees are not productive, are more likely to leave your company, and they have a negative impact on other colleagues, customer service and sales.
Back in 2004 I worked with Aston Business School on reviewing the NHS Staff Survey (the latest data set in Europe). Low staff morale directly impacted patient outcomes – employee wellbeing is literally a matter life or death in that environment.
Research tells us that satisfied employees are more focused, satisfied and productive. Are your employees satisfied, engaged and motivated at work? Do they feel valued?
While there’s no such thing as a quick fix, there are probably a number of practical solutions that you could put in place to improve employee engagement. If you would like to improve the way you engage and motivate your employees, click the button below to find out how I can help you.
Building Mental Resilience
We’re all expected to ‘do more with less’ which puts additional pressure on your workforce. They are keen to do a great job, but tend to struggle when they’re asked to take on more responsibility, or cover for an absent colleague.
You know that if your employees are already feeling stressed, they are less able to focus, less engaged, and less productive.
While you probably have Employee Assistance Programmes in place for people who are experiencing a great deal of stress, you also need to offer the rest of your workforce, what I call, a ‘resilience booster’ ever now and then. This could be one-day training programme tailored to your industry and the particular stressors your employees are facing.
I offer a one-day training programme for non-managers, and a three-day training programme for leaders, which incorporates more advanced theory and practice, including how to identify, coach and manage others’ stress levels.Not only do I have personal experience of near-burnout (as a senior HR manager in the financial sector during the credit-crunch), I also have training in several Cognitive Behavioural Therapy methods, Mindfulness, and Mindful Self-Compassion. I only draw on evidence-based methods that work for me and my clients.
As well as my workshops being fully interactive, I pride myself on simplifying complex techniques for everyday use. Every participant leaves my sessions feeling more in control of how they feel and armed with practical tools that can put in place immediately, at work and at home.
A typical one-day Resilience workshop includes
- How the organisation values employees
- Stressors at work
- Resilience, stress and peak performance
- Resilient mindset and healthy habits
- Daily Mindfulness & Self-Compassion techniques
- Action plans, reflection time
- Interactive session, group and 1:1 workIf you would like to talk to me about running Resilience programmes for your organisation, you can email me or click the green button below to set up a call at your convenience.
Mindful Self-Compassion
I know it sounds a bit woo-woo, and mindfulness has definitely reached fad-status, but there is a lot of evidence to show how being mindful in the workplace, and at home, can improve task-focus, reduce stress, and therefore enhance productivity and personal resilience.
We all struggle to focus on one thing when we are being asked to do several things by several people, under tight deadlines. Remember when it used to be cool to multi-task? We’d compete with each other by saying how busy we are. But we’ve moved on and, thankfully, we have realised that self-care is not an option; it’s essential.
By understanding the theory and practicing simple mindfulness techniques, participants will learn the difference between reactive and proactive thinking. They will feel in more control of their automatic negative thought processes. They will also learn that they can choose how to respond to stressful situations.
The additional ‘self-compassion’ element in this programme helps participants to acknowledge and accept their own needs, and therefore bette at asking for support. Self-compassion also builds self-confidence – by allowing and nurturing your own talents (instead of constantly looking to others for approval). There’s also the longer term impact on the organisational culture: If we are kinder to ourselves, we can be kinder to our colleagues.This programme enables your employees to be more self-sufficient in managing their stress levels in all aspects of their life.
I offer a one-day training programme for non-managers, and a three-day training programme for leaders, which incorporates more advanced theory and practice, including how to identify, coach and manage others’ stress levels.
My programmes are tailored to your industry and the particular situation your employees are facing.
You might have already read that, not only do I have personal experience of near-burnout (as a senior HR manager in the financial sector during the credit-crunch), I also have training in several Cognitive Behavioural Therapy methods, Mindfulness, and Mindful Self-Compassion. I only draw on evidence-based methods that work for me and my clients.
As well as my workshops being fully interactive, I pride myself on simplifying complex techniques for everyday use. Every participant leaves my sessions feeling more in control of how they feel and armed with practical tools that can put in place immediately, at work and at home.
A typical one-day Mindfulness & Self-Compassion workshop includes
- The case for mindfulness at work
- Stressors at work & current coping mechanisms
- Mindfulness techniques – theory and practice
- Self-compassion techniques – theory and practice
- Action plans, reflection time
- Interactive session, group and 1:1 work
If you would like to talk to me about running Resilience programmes for your organisation, you can email me or click the green button below to set up a call at your convenience.
Why Choose to Work with Me?
Clients & Sectors
Whether you are a medium-sized businesses wanting rapid growth or a global organisation seeking to engage your employees, implement a culture change, or develop your middle managers into senior leaders, I can help.
My clients are from a variety of industries including retail, pharmaceutical, publishing, education, defence, private and public healthcare.
Large-scale Programmes
I’ve also held senior HR leadership roles. Working in the financial services sector I helped drive improvements across Assessment & Selection, Organisational Development, Employee Engagement and Leadership Development functions.
Strategic & Creative
Consultancy suits my personal strengths of being creative, strategic, empathic and solution-focused. I get a deep sense of satisfaction from finding workable solutions that are pragmatic and resource-efficient.
Adding Value at Every Step
During my career as a freelance Business Psychologist I’ve learned the importance of being able to add value for my clients at every step of the project, not just being focused on the end result.
I’ve been told that I’m not like other consultants: I’m not afraid to say what I see. You are paying me to identify challenges and to talk about the elephant in the room.
Enabling Positive Change
That’s exactly what I do (talk about the elephant in the room): for the benefit of your team or your organisation, I call it out. Even though it can sometimes feel uncomfortable for the organisation to hear, I’ll be helping you to enable real change and improve your bottom line.
Scroll down to find out more about how I work. If you’d like to talk about how I can help you, or simply share ideas, click the button below for a free 30-minute Consultation Call.
Or if you’re looking for something specific, you can email me directly jess@jessbaker.co.uk