Strategy - People - Delivery
How does psychology help deliver business success?
Even with a good business strategy and well designed systems, delivering high performance ultimately comes down to the behavioural choices of individual people. Understanding how to create the right environment to encourage individuals to respond in positive, productive ways at work is essential to success. As well as providing tailor-made solutions to problems, The Keil Centre specialises in taking a proactive approach to positive people management. We look to identify ways of preventing problems and building continuous improvement into the way people work.
Professional, evidence-based practice
At The Keil Centre, we pride ourselves on the fact that feedback about our services consistently praises our professional, results-focused approach. One consequence of this is that the majority of our work comes from repeat business and word of mouth recommendations. We also take our own professional development very seriously which ensures our work is based on soundly-researched evidence.
Tackling causes, not symptoms
One of the main advantages of applying psychological principles to organisational challenges is that they offer a route to get at the heart of an issue. While systems and procedures can be fixed using logic, problems associated with responses of individuals need more careful consideration, and often an outside perspective to find effective solutions. The Keil Centre provides organisations with tools and techniques to help understand key factors affecting individual behaviours, such as organisational culture, motivation, team dynamics, leadership styles, responses to change, etc. Working in partnership with organisations, we seek to tackle the causes of impaired performance, not just alleviate the symptoms.
A multidisciplinary approach
The Keil Centre offers a broad range of knowledge and expertise provided by our multidisciplinary team. Whatever the issue, there will be someone in the team who can help. Between us, we have expertise across all areas of organisational development, assessment, human factors, health and safety, and clinical/counselling psychology. We work collaboratively and regularly form multi-disciplinary teams to precisely meet our clients’ needs.
If you are interested in finding out more, please contact Louise Clarkson.
Practical support to manage your career
The ever increasing need for organisations to evolve and change can sometimes leave individual employees feeling unsure of their position and direction. In a recent project with the Forestry Commission, The Keil Centre designed workshops to help individuals develop the awareness and skills to effectively manage their own careers within the context of continuous change.
Said Fiona Wright, Personnel Policy Branch, Forestry Commission: ‘We saw very real benefits for the Commission in helping our people to do this. Feedback indicates that the course has helped people become clearer about the direction that they want to take, with some forming new plans for their own immediate development. This has benefits for the Commission, because people can be more settled and look for ways to “grow” their current role. We look forward to offering more events in 2005 and opening
these up to a wider group of Forestry Commission people.’
If you are interested in finding out more, please contact Louise Clarkson.
Why do people do what they do? Influencing the human factor in accidents at work
Why do people do what they do? – the answer to this question, and how to influence safer behaviour, is often unclear for those investigating workplace accidents. It may be clear what happened, but not clear why those directly or indirectly involved behaved as they did. To help investigators in BP and Balfour Beatty Rail better understand how to analyse and influence behaviour, The Keil Centre’s human factors psychologists developed a set of practical, user-friendly analytical tools. Following a period of trialling and an
external peer review, these methods have been taught to groups of experienced investigators, typically from an engineering or safety
background. The methods have been well-received, and have already led to greater insight into why rules and procedures were broken, human errors occurred and have led to better recommendations which will influence safe behaviour and reduce the likelihood of error in the future. Although developed with safety in mind, these methods have also been successfully applied to improve important business and environmental behaviours.
Said Jan Smith, HSE Leader, BP Forties Pipeline System: ‘These tools provide us with a new analytical way of understanding behaviours at all levels in the organisation, and help us to recommend actions which I’m sure will improve our performance’.
For more information, please contact Ronny Lardner.
Frequently Asked Questions on Stress
At The Keil Centre we help organisations from a wide variety of sectors in tackling stress at work. Here are the answers to a few frequently asked questions:
What is stress?
The UK Health and Safety Executive defines stress as: the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of
demand placed on them. Is a little bit of stress not a good thing? No. Pressure is a positive state when we feel motivated and challenged; stress is when we feel we cannot cope with the demand the situation places on us. Being under pressure is positive; being under stress has both short and long-term negative effects on mental and physical health and performance. Common symptoms include: headaches, sleeping difficulties, feeling anxious and lacking confidence.
What about the role of individual differences?
Everyone’s experience of a given situation will be different. This will be influenced by personality, previous experience, selfconfidence
and other pressures the person is under. However, no-one is immune from stress.
Is building greater resilience the best solution?
Providing staff with training and development opportunities to increase their resilience will help. But you cannot rely on staff being resilient and just pile on the pressure – legally, logically or morally. Also, there are benefits to tackling sources of stress at work as these are often the same issues that are affecting effectiveness and productivity.
What should employers do about stress?
UK health and safety law is clear in this respect – Stress can be caused by work so all employers have to take reasonable steps to ensure their staff are not harmed by this at work. Other legislation is also relevant in some cases: e.g. The Working Time Regulations 1998. We recommend that organisations consider taking action at 3 levels:
- Prevention – identifying and acting on the causes of stress at work using a risk assessment approach.
- Management – giving staff more skills to cope with unavoidable stress
- Treatment – providing access to professional support if required
What should individuals do about stress?
Individuals should also be taking steps to tackle stress themselves. Building own resilience and improving coping strategies will help. Also individuals should make sure they don’t suffer in silence but raise work issues promptly and seek the support of others.
How can The Keil Centre help?
The Keil Centre offers expertise on:
- Stress Prevention: StressTools, our web-based stress risk assessment toolkit; advice in developing policies for tacking stress; absence management; return to work;
- Stress Management: Tailored individual and group input on a variety of stress management skills;
- Stress Treatment: Qualified counselling & clinical psychologists with experience of working with individuals in occupational settings; return to work service; medico-legal reports.
For more information, please contact Chiara Amati.