Respectful behaviours training and manager development
The Situation
A large retail nursery came to us with a people problem they could feel but could not fix. Communication between staff had broken down. Some of it had turned uncivil. And processes and policies were being skipped, because nobody was clear on who was meant to do what. The team was still turning up. The culture was not.
The Challenge
Three things were tangled together. Staff were not talking to each other well. Some behaviour had crossed into disrespect. And the managers had no consistent way to handle either. You cannot fix the floor without fixing the people running it. So the work had to happen at both levels.
What we did
Stage one. Every employee.
We ran the full team through equal opportunity, bullying and harassment training, along with respectful behaviours in the workplace. Everyone left knowing where the line sat and why it mattered.
Stage two. The management team.
Then the managers sat down for two days of deeper work. We covered personality types, so they could read their people properly. Communication skills, so they could adjust how they delivered a message. And record keeping, so decisions and conversations were documented the way they should be. By the end, employees knew what was expected of them. Managers knew what was expected of them. Same page, first time in a long time.
The Result
Communication improved right across the organisation. The bigger shift was quieter than that. One after another, people had the same realisation. That colleague who had been getting under their skin was not targeting them at all. It was a different personality type. A different communication style. Nothing personal. Once people understood that, the tension started to drain out of the room. The nursery moved its culture in a positive direction and kept its team together.
“Quite a few people had their moments where they realised why a person might have been behaving like they were. It wasn’t anything personal against them.” Sheena Kane, Kane Independent Consulting
