For National Work Life week we caught up with MD Jonty Abbott to talk about wellbeing at work and the coaching credits Fluid offers to all staff.
What’s business coaching all about?
We work with Amanda and Simon at Northern Value Creators, their team of business coaches is available to all our people. It’s up to individuals if they want to use their coaching credits, and what they want to use them on. The sessions are personal and confidential. They don’t have to talk about work specifically, they can tackle any blockers they’re facing.
How did the partnership with Northern Value Creators get started?
I’d worked with Simon about ten years ago. We’d kept in touch, and he told me he was setting up Northern Value Creators with his wife, Amanda. At the time they were offering business coaching and we talked about how it was something people could benefit from, and I thought it was something potentially I could benefit from.
What did you get out of business coaching?
At the time I was still very much involved in client delivery, as well as figuring out how to run a consultancy. What Amanda did was ask great questions that led me to several important realisations and reframing my ways of thinking. As an IT Project and Programme Manager I’d been professionally engineered to deliver stuff. I equated progress with output. I realised I was having to give myself permission to take time out to think strategically about the business. Working with Amanda helped me move forward and move the company forward faster.
Why did you decide to offer business coaching to every employee?
I’d really benefitted from it. It helped me be happier and understand more about what I wanted to achieve and what I wanted to do.
The success of Fluid is based on the premise that if you create an environment where people are empowered to achieve what they want to achieve in their careers and be happy, and marry that with opportunities to help clients, then you’ve got mutual benefit and collective success.
That’s what Fluid is about, we want our people to be getting what they want in their careers to move them on to where they want to be and working with ambitious clients who want their businesses to grow, succeed and achieve things. And if we can curate that environment then the rest will take care of itself.
Obviously you need some commercial nous in there too, but I’m trying to build an environment where I want to work, with people I want to work with, where we break down barriers so people can speak freely, share ideas and buzz off each other.
In order to do that you need a high trust environment. People need to feel safe and secure and be encouraged to speak their minds freely. I think we can at times be held back by previous experiences that are subconsciously influencing the way we work. Through business coaching we can ditch that and achieve more, more quickly.
What does business coaching do for Fluid?
We’re a people company. At the heart of high performing teams is being able to talk openly and freely. And if people are holding back because of baggage, because of misconceptions, then we can’t move fast in an agile way.
Business coaching helps people have conversations that clear the air and resolve issues so they can move forward at pace. Business coaching helps all of us move quicker, more easily and achieve everything we would have done, but faster. It’s a tool for elevating our performance.
Business Coaching is part of our Collective Success
Fluid was founded in the belief that work can be a place where people can proudly bring their whole self, where they are empowered to succeed and be happy and where we empower our clients to succeed and be happy.
We call this Collective Success. It's not just something we say, it's what we do everyday.