Entrepreneurial Scotland and Team HOi:
A passion for nurturing leadership talent unites the entire team at Entrepreneurial Scotland, a charity that promotes Scotland’s prosperity by developing the students who will become the next generation of business leaders.
Recognising that its own team needed support, Entrepreneurial Scotland engaged with Team HOi to master the challenges of collaboration in the new world of hybrid working.
Entrepreneurial Scotland has its eyes on a prosperous future for Scotland, and a clear vision of how it will enable that. It identifies the most promising students among Scotland’s 16 universities and puts them through an intensive development programme that cultivates their natural talents for leadership, like creativity, ambition, communication and problem-solving.
When Covid hit, Entrepreneurial Scotland had already run successfully for almost 15 years. Its high-performance Saltire Scholars team knew exactly how to identify high-potential students, put them through the programme and choose those best suited for placement as interns with major UK and international companies.
The Scholars team took in its stride the abrupt switch to 100% remote working, but as the world opened up again post-lockdown, clear challenges were emerging. Staff still believed in the organisation but were feeling overstretched, and a sense of cohesion among the team was falling away.
“Because we’re a charitable organisation, if I have a problem for example with motivating staff, I can’t just throw money at the issue – and in fact, increased remuneration wouldn’t have solved our challenges,” recalls Entrepreneurial Scotland CEO Sean McGrath. “We rely on people’s passion; for us to succeed, I have to nurture that and protect it.”
But doing so was becoming more difficult, and problems that had never arisen before were becoming a concern: missed messages and mixed messages, discord and even disagreement among the team. “If we didn’t tackle this, I knew we were going to lose good people,” he says.
Reconnecting to make hybrid working a success
Entrepreneurial Scotland decided to engage Team HOi, whose transformation programme coaches businesses through the process of optimising the hybrid workplace. Its philosophy is simple: stopgap work methods adopted in haste for lockdown are rarely optimal for the employee, the organisation or their shared mission. And elements of the workday that have quietly disappeared – such as subtle and continuous communication about the organisational mission – need to be reclaimed and emphasised.
Team HOi’s methodology for optimising the hybrid workplace touches both the workforce and the senior leadership team, and it’s a change programme that Sean says quickly proved its worth to Entrepreneurial Scotland.
A four-step process to optimising the hybrid workplace
Discovery: interviews with staff determine their views about the organisation in key categories, and assess how full each person’s “tank” is (energy, motivation, health)
1-2-1 coaching: tailored programme is introduced based on insights from Discovery, including guidance for healthier work habits and time management, and weekly check-ins for each team member with Team HOi Leader Louise Barnes
Group activities: integration of new work practices into the day for all team members, including sessions for movement, conscious breaks, and task planning
Cultural change: new, evidence-based list of actions is introduced to help the organisation develop a positive hybrid-work culture. These include improvements in internal communications, a move to one day in the office a week for the team, and new initiatives based on topics staff have identified as high priority.
Shared experiences lead to bonding and communication
The team’s reaction to the programme was universally positive, with staff members saying it led to meaningful conversations with each other and a refreshed sense of camaraderie – especially important for team members who’d joined post-Covid and had no shared history. Keeping track of team “tank” scores over time clearly showed the improvement in morale, energy levels and motivation, with a noticeable drop in feelings of burnout.
CEO Sean McGrath says the programme’s weekly staff check-ins not only saved time that would otherwise be spent by the senior leadership in conducting 1-2-1s, but they also provided a way for staff and leadership to communicate via the neutral third party of Team HOI’s Leader. “The sessions allowed individuals to open up to Louise about anything,” Sean says. “As that trusted third party, Louise helped my messages reach the team, and vice versa, so I gained real insights about the cause of blockages we’d experienced.”
“Since the Team HOI engagement I’ve noticed a marked increase in my messages landing with the team, and in people understanding what we’re trying to do,” he said. “Certainly the programme saved us a month’s worth of time that would have been wasted with poor communication, which is about £55,000 in staff wages.”
When it comes to advancing Entrepreneurial Scotland’s five-year plan, this time savings is especially important, Sean says. “If I hadn’t had the support of Louise and Team HOi, I think I’d have marched on with my plan, looked around and there’d have been nobody behind me.”
Sean says he’d recommend the programme to other organisations who are seeing the warning signs that team cohesion is slipping. “If you’re a small, tight team, but you’re sitting there as leader thinking, ‘these guys are not connecting with my messages, or with each other,’ that’s when you need to bring someone in, as we did.”
Entrepreneurial Scotland is now on track to meet its goal of 25% year-on-year growth in the Scholars Team and plans to expand Team HOi’s work to other parts of its organisation.
Sean says the greatest value he’s seen is the clarity of communications that Team HOi helped them achieve. Keeping those lines open is something they plan to keep working on. “It’s a bit like going to the gym -- you can’t just get fit and then say good-bye to your personal trainer,” he says. “We need to continually work on making communication work.”
Connect with us to discuss your how to make remote work www.teamhoi.co.uk/contact-us.