Giving the leadership team a common language and creating a feedback culture.

Next was the 12 week Happy Leadership Programme, held online, for their leadership team. “All the leadership team got together every week. It was not theoretical but absolutely practical. Real tips on how to be a better leader.

“We now have a common language, based around the red, blue, yellow and green communications styles. When we onboard people, we get them to do the survey and add their colour to their profile.  

“It built the energy in the right direction. We now know what our targets are, and they are all aligned.

“It definitely helped me. For instance having those ‘critical conversations’, where you need to address an issue with somebody. I used to definitely stress out about them but am now getting better every day, based around the structure that Suzi (our facilitator) shared.”

“We moved from an annual performance appraisal, which would generally be focused monetarily, to a three-month feedback session. Now we have peer-to-peer feedback based upon praising each other – and praise even for the smallest thing.”

Changes to Avegen’s recruitment process

“We have 45 people, who are a very dense talent cohort. We expect standards to be very high for any particular role.

“It is very important that we choose the right people. One example we’ve picked up from the programme is that before we agree to take somebody on, they spend a day in the office and get to interact with all our people.

“We have continued the work with a couple of sessions every month on people and culture – focusing on particular topics.

“We embarked on the programme because we want to build a really engaged workforce and for our people to be happy, to have fun while working in a particular role. And we believe we are moving towards that.”